LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
September 02/2019
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site
http://data.eliasbejjaninews.com/eliasnews19/english.september02.19.htm
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Bible Quotations For today
The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything
by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to
God.
Letter to the Philippians 04/01-07:”Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I
love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my
beloved. I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.
Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have
struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the
rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life. Rejoice in the Lord
always; again I will say, Rejoice.Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The
Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and
supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the
peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your
minds in Christ Jesus./
Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese
Related News published on September 01-02/2019
Hizballah’s attack on an IDF target was no one-off. More to come
IDF tells Israel-Lebanon border communities alert over
Israel says exchange of fire with Hezbollah likely over
Bahrain calls on its citizens to leave Lebanon immediately
A Bundle Of Arabic/English Reports addressing today's Clashed between Hezbollah
& Israel
Hezbollah Missiles Hit Israeli Base, Military Vehicle on Lebanese Border; No
Casualties
No Injuries In Hezbollah Missile Salvo: Restrictions Lifted in North-IDF
Anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon towards Israeli town: Israeli military
Anti-tank Fire From Lebanon Targets Northern Israel, Israeli Army Says
Missiles Fired From Lebanon at Israeli Base; Hezbollah Says Destroyed Military
Vehicle
Hariri Asks Pompeo, French Presidency to Rein in Israel after Hizbullah Attack
Hizbullah Attacks Israeli Vehicle, Netanyahu Says No Casualties
Del Cole: To stop all activities threatening the cessation of hostilities
UNIFIL Urges 'Restraint' after Hizbullah Attack, Israeli Shelling
Israel Fires Shells on Shebaa Farms as Drone Sets Forest Ablaze
Israeli FM Slams Nasrallah as 'Iranian Puppet'
On Israel's Borders, Drone Rivalries Play Out
Drones Banned over Several Lebanese Areas for Ashoura
Lebanese Army Says Israeli Drone Drops Incendiary Material in So
Nasrallah: We Will Retaliate for Drone Attacks Everywhere We Can Along Border
With Israel
Geagea: Without LF's martyrs, we would not have been here, nor would there have
been Maarab or Baabda!
AlRahi calls for consolidating the rule of law and institutions in the country
Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports
And News published on September 01-02/2019
Iran unveils new reconnaissance and attack drone
Iranian Oil Tanker Pursued by US Approaches Syria
Rouhani Warns Macron of Looming Nuclear Step
Russia Says US Strikes on Syria's Idlib Violate Agreements
Syrian Democratic Council: We Asked Moscow to Resume Negotiations with Damascus
Russia Accuses U.S. of Risking Idlib Truce with Strike on Jihadists
Netanyahu Repeats Pledge to Annex Israeli Settlements in Occupied West Bank
Pope Says Got Stuck in Vatican Lift, Freed by Fireman
Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous
sources published on September 01-02/2019
Hizballah’s attack on an IDF target
was no one-off. More to come/DEBKAfile/August 01/2019
IDF tells Israel-Lebanon border communities alert over/Ynetnews/Associated
Press/August 01/2019
Hezbollah Missiles Hit Israeli Base, Military Vehicle on Lebanese Border; No
Casualties/Jack Khoury, Yaniv Kubovich and Noa Shpigel/Haaretz/September 01/2019
No Injuries In Hezbollah Missile Salvo: Restrictions Lifted in North-IDF/Jerusalem
Post/August 01/2019
Anti-tank Fire From Lebanon Targets Northern Israel, Israeli Army Says/Jack
Khoury and Yaniv Kubovich/Haaretz/August 01/2019
Missiles Fired From Lebanon at Israeli Base; Hezbollah Says Destroyed Military
Vehicle/Jack Khoury, Yaniv Kubovich and Noa Shpigel /Haaretz/September 01/2019
Nasrallah: We Will Retaliate for Drone Attacks Everywhere We Can Along Border
With Israel/Yaniv Kubovich, Noa Shpigel and Jack Khoury/Haaretz/August 31/2019
Analysis/Iran, Yemen and Two More Bleeding Fronts Awaiting Trump's Next Tweet/Zvi
Bar'el/Haaretz/August 01/2019
Africa’s Sahel Region Urgently Needs the World’s Help/Noah
Smith/Bloomberg/September 01/2019
A Plan for Peace/Benjamin Netanyahu/The Tablet site/August 01/2019
European Dreams vs. Mass Migration/Giulio Meotti/Gatestone Institute/September
01/2019
Why Iran must cool its rhetoric/Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/September 01/2019
Four days to save the United Kingdom/Baria Alamuddin/Arab News/September 01/2019
Peace in Afghanistan remains a distant dream/Talmiz Ahmad/Arab News/September
01/2019
The Syrian wind is turning against Erdogan/Yasar Yakis/Arab News/September
01/2019
The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News
published
on September 01-02/2019
Hizballah’s attack on an IDF target was no one-off. More to come
DEBKAfile/August 01/2019
The IDF’s response to the 4 Kornet 9M1333 anti-tank missiles Hizballah fired at
a military position and ambulance near Moshav Avivit on Sunday, Sept. 1, was
carefully calibrated to avoid sparking a major flare-up. Israeli tank, artillery
and aerial units blasted the South Lebanese Ras a-Maroun and Yiroun villages
from which Hizballah fired, but otherwise concentrated their fire on unpopulated
land to avoid casualties. While the military response was swift, it was also
kept in check to make sure that life in Israel’s border communities was restored
to its normal routine with all possible speed. The entire exchange of fire
lasted a couple of hours before the military announced it was over without
Israeli casualties. This told Hizballah that it had failed in its bid for avenge
the deaths of its two former adherents, converted members of Iran’s Al Qods
Brigades, who were killed in the Israeli strike south of Damascus on Aug. 24 for
thwarting a killer drone attack.Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah is unlikely to let
it go at that. Indeed, the entire incident wound down under a cloud of
uncertainty and unanswered questions. Has he got a major operation ready to go
when Israel’s high alert and massive military deployments on its northern
borders show signs of weakening? Will Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani pat
Nasrallah on the back or tell him to do better with a more seriously damaging
assault on Israel? By the same token, there is no telling whether the rocket
attack was no more the signal for the start of an Iranian backed war of
attrition from Lebanon in tune with the Hamas terrorist campaign plaguing
southern Israel.
DEBKAfile’s military sources calculate that the odds on more Hizballah attacks
are high for three reasons:
1-Nasrallah badly needs a military coup after the successful operations against
Hizballah that Israel pulled off in Beirut and Syria two weeks ago. The rocket
attack on Sunday hardly fit that bill.
2-A single rocket attack is a poor show when compared with 18 months of
continuous Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad operations against Israel. He
needs much more damaging and impressive action to support his and Iran’s claim
to lead the “axis of resistance.” 3-Soleimani and Nasrallah have hatched a
conspiracy to engineer Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ouster in Israel’s
Sept. 17 general election by violent operations for damaging his credibility as
the guardian of national security.
IDF tells Israel-Lebanon border communities alert over
Ynetnews/Associated Press/August 01/2019
Hezbollah vowed to avenge the deaths of two operatives it says were killed in an
Israeli strike in Syria last week and Israeli forces have been on high alert in
expectation of an attack from the Iranian-backed terror group
Israeli communities along the Lebanon border were told Sunday to return to their
routines after exchanges of fire between Israel and the Lebanese based Hezbollah
terror group, ended.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commenting on
anti-tank missile fire towards an IDF base on the border, said his country
responded by launching approximately 100 artillery shells at the sources of fire
and that no Israelis were hurt in the incident. Earlier, the sudden burst of
violence raised the prospect of a wider round of fighting between Israel and the
Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Hezbollah vowed to avenge the deaths of a
pair of operatives it says were killed in an Israeli strike in Syria last week.
Hezbollah is also out to avenge an alleged Israeli drone strike in Beirut that
Israeli media have said destroyed a sophisticated piece of equipment needed to
manufacture precision-guided missiles. The bitter enemies, which fought a
monthlong war in 2006 that ended in a stalemate, have appeared to be on a
collision course in recent weeks amid a series of covert and overt Israeli
military strikes and Hezbollah vows of revenge. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad
Hariri held telephone calls with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as well as
an adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron urging Washington and Paris as
well as the international community to intervene in the volatile situation.
Israel considers Iran to be its greatest enemy, and Iran-backed Hezbollah to be
its most immediate military threat. Hezbollah has an experienced army that has
been fighting alongside the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad in Syria’s
civil war, and it is believed to possess an arsenal of some 130,000 missiles and
rockets. Throughout the Syrian war, Israel has acknowledged carrying out scores
of airstrikes in Syria aimed at preventing alleged Iranian arms transfers to
Hezbollah. But in recent weeks, Israel is believed to have struck Iranian or
Hezbollah targets in Iraq and Lebanon as well. In response, Israel has bolstered
its forces along the northern border with Lebanon. Hezbollah has denied it is
pursuing a domestic missile-production program. “The Islamic Resistance carried
out the secretary general’s promise to retaliate for the two aggressions,”
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV presented said Sunday, referring to the Israeli
airstrike in Syria and drone strike in Beirut.
In a speech early Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran
of fomenting the violence. “A new empire has arisen, the goal of which is to
defeat us. They dispatch proxies,” he said. “We are dealing with extremist Islam
led by various elements, but in the end, the biggest threat to our existence
comes from Iran.”In Sunday’s fighting, the Israeli military statement reported a
“number of hits” by anti-tank missiles fired at an IDF base and vehicles near
the Lebanese border in northern Israel. The IDF responded by shelling “the
source of the fire and targets in southern Lebanon.”There was no word on
casualties. In Lebanon, the Israeli shelling was concentrated on areas close to
the border near the villages of Maroun el-Ras and Yaroun, setting off some
fires. Hezbollah said the unit that carried out the attack on Israel was named
after two operatives who were killed in the Israeli airstrike on Syria on Aug.
24. It said one of its units had destroyed an Israeli military vehicle and
wounded the people inside. Earlier Sunday, the Lebanese army had claimed an
Israeli drone violated the country’s airspace and dropped flammable material on
fields, triggering a fire that was extinguished shortly afterward by residents.
Despite Israel and Hezbollah’s deep hostility, they have largely refrained from
direct fighting for the past 13 years. The IDF said it had encouraged residents
near the northern border with Lebanon to stay indoors and ordered public bomb
shelters to open.
Israel says exchange of fire with Hezbollah
likely over
AFP/Sunday, 1 September 2019
Israel’s military said an exchange of fire with Hezbollah along its border with
Lebanon on Sunday was likely over and there were no Israeli casualties despite
damage on the Israeli side. “The tactical event near Avivim, the exchange of
fire, is most likely over,” Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus told
journalists, adding that a military ambulance was hit in the escalation.
Bahrain calls on its citizens to leave Lebanon immediately
Staff writer, Al Arabiya/EnglishSunday, 1 September 2019
Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday instructed its citizens to leave Lebanon
immediately, citing “security events and developments,” after a week of growing
tensions raised fears of a new war between Israel and Hezbollah. “The Ministry
of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Bahrain calls on all citizens in the
Republic of Lebanon to leave immediately, given the events and developments in
the country that require everyone to take precautions,” the statement carried on
Bahrain News Agency read. Bahrain has previously said its citizens should not to
travel to Lebanon for any reason.
رزمة من التقارير العربية والإنكليزية
تغطي الاشتباكات العسكرية التي جرت اليوم بين حزب الله و‘إسرائيل عبر الحدود
A Bundle Of Arabic/English Reports
addressing today's Clashed between Hezbollah & Israel
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/78084/%d8%b1%d8%b2%d9%85%d8%a9-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%aa%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%b1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%b1%d8%a8%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d9%88%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d9%86%d9%83%d9%84%d9%8a%d8%b2%d9%8a%d8%a9/
Hezbollah Missiles Hit Israeli Base,
Military Vehicle on Lebanese Border; No Casualties
تقارير من الهآرتس تغطي استهداف حزب الله لآلية عسكرية إسرائيلية عبر الحدود من
منطقة مارون الراس
Jack Khoury, Yaniv Kubovich and Noa Shpigel/Haaretz/September 01/2019
Lebanese army says Israel shelled southern Lebanon territory ■ Hezbollah claims
Israelis killed ■ Incident comes after Nasrallah threatened to attack
Several anti-tank missiles were fired from Lebanon Sunday at an Israeli army
base and military vehicle in Israel's north, the Israeli army said, adding there
were no casulaties on the Israeli side.
Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen TV said that Hezbollah has destroyed an Israeli military
vehicle near the border, and that the strike "killed and wounded those inside,"
but the Israeli military later refuted those claims.
The Israeli military returned fire at the sources of the strike and at targets
in southern Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces said, later adding that after
several hours the exchange of fire has ended.
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has called on U.S. Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo and French President Emmanuel Macron to "intervene immediately" to
de-escalate the situation, Hariri's office said.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin opened his meeting with the Ethiopian president
with a message to Hezbollah, saying that it is known to all those wishing to
harm Israel that "We are ready and prepared to protect the citizens of Israel
wherever they may be. We are ready, and we do not want to show you just how
much." He added, "Take heed that the quiet can prevail only on both sides of the
border."
The Lebanese army said that Israel fired more than 40 shells at border villages,
causing blazes, and that the shelling that continued into the evening. The army
did not report on Lebanese casaulties.
According to reports in Lebanese media, there was fire in the Maroun al-Ras
area, on the Israeli border. The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV channel
reported that Israeli artillery strikes in the area are ongoing.
Across the border, residents of the Israeli communities of Avivim and Yiron
reported hearing explosions. Avivim resident Eliezer Biton told Haaretz that
exchanges of fire continue. "The community is locked down. Everyone is in
shelters or protected rooms," he said, speaking from his shelter. He was near
the border, across from Maroun al-Ras, when the first strike took place. "We
were ready for it. There's been tension in past days," he said.
Hezbollah announced that at a quarter past four on Sunday, one of its cells "hit
an Israeli armored vehicle near Avivim and killed and wounded those inside."
Israeli defense sources say Hezbollah’s offensive, which included missile fire
at tanks and other military targets all at once, was designed to make it
difficult for the IDF to respond immediately.
The Israeli army instructed municipalities near the border to open their
shelters, and announced that residents who live up to four kilometers from the
Lebanon border should remain in their homes and enter shelters if sirens sound.
It also urged locals to cancel all activities along the border, including
farming and children's activities.
At Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, the helipad has been opened.
The IDF has set up roadblocks on arteries leading north, and is blocking traffic
from entering northern towns.
Earlier Sunday, the Lebanese army said that an Israeli drone violated Lebanon's
airspace and dropped incendiary material that sparked a fire in a pine forest by
the border.
The Lebanese army statement said it was following up with UN peacekeepers in the
area but gave no further details.
Other reports from Lebanon claimed that unmanned aerial vehicles dropped
flammables on a grove nearby known as the Bastra Farm in order to set fire to
the place so as to expose further targets.
The Israeli army confirmed fires broke out in the area due to military action.
Over the weekend, illuminating bombs were hurled over the Shebba Farms, and
Lebanese media outlets reported that fires were sparked as a result.
The reported attack comes a day after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said
that his Shi'ite group will retaliate for drone attacks last week in Beirut that
he has attributed to Israel "in every possible place along the border."
"Our response for last week's events will be [launched from] within Lebanon
against Israeli targets. We usually strike in the area of the Shebba Farms
[Mount Dov]," but this time the group will not limit its attacks on one area, he
added.
The Israeli military bolstered troops on the northern border over the weekend
due to concerns that such a retaliatory attack will take place.
The Israeli defense establishment still believes the Shi'ite group is determined
to respond to the attack, but is not interested in sparking a war. Nonetheless,
security forces are preparing for the possibility of a violent round of fighting
that could lead to another strike in Lebanon. Aerial defense batteries have been
deployed in the north to thwart drones and other umanned aerial vehicles that
terror organization may try to launch to attack Israel. The Israeli army has
also instructed that the airspace near the northern border be closed off. The
Israel Navy, meanwhile, is preparing for possible attacks on Israeli vessels.
On Saturday, local residents reported seeing many troops moving around the area
of the Golan Heights, and said they saw tanks and armored personnel carriers.
Illuminating bombs were fired overnight on Friday near the Druze village of
Majdal Shams, and Lebanese media outlets reported that the bombs had caused
fires to break out in the area.
The Israeli military began preparing for a retaliatory attack by Hezbollah
following an attack last week, which the group claimed Israel had carried out:
Two explosive-laden drones hit a machine designed to improve precision missiles,
which was being operated in Dahieh – a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The
Israeli defense establishment assessed that Hezbollah would try to retaliate but
would react moderately; the army minimized patrols along the borders with
Lebanon and Syria in order to avoid presenting possible targets for the group to
attack.
No Injuries In Hezbollah Missile Salvo: Restrictions Lifted
in North-IDF
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for attack against IDF position and military
ambulance near Avivim.
Jerusalem Post/August 01/2019
There were no injuries after several anti-tank missiles were fired by Hezbollah
from Lebanon towards an IDF base and military vehicles northern Israel, IDF
Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis confirmed Sunday afternoon.
“A number of anti-aircraft missiles were fired from Lebanon at an IDF base and
military vehicles in the area,” the IDF said. “There are a number of confirmed
hits.”According to Manelis, Hezbollah fired at least three Kornet anti-tank
missiles at a military position and military ambulance at around 4 in the
afternoon. There were no injuries or casualties. Manelis stated that while
Hezbollah was able to carry out their retaliation, the military had been
prepared for the scenario of an anti-tank missile attack and had taken the
necessary precautions to ensure that there would be no casualties.
The military nevertheless warned that it was not yet sure if the attack on
Avivim was the full extent of Hezbollah’s retaliation for an Israeli airstrike
on Saturday night against an Iranian led cell in Syria which killed two
Hezbollah members planning a drone attack on Israel. Following the Kornet
attack, Israel’s military returned fire at targets in southern Lebanon, firing
over 100 artillery shells as well as an airstrike against the cell responsible
for the attack.
The military also ordered residents living within 4 kilometers of the border to
remain in their homes and open their bomb shelters. Any activity along the
border fence area, including agricultural work, is prohibited and the IDF urged
residents of the area not to travel on open roads near the border.
Latest articles from Jpost
Hezbollah took responsibility for the attack near the community of Avivim.
The group was quoted by the Al Manar television channel as saying that “at 16.15
Hasan Zbeeb and Yasser Daher's brigade destroyed an Israeli military vehicle
near the border, killing and wounding those inside.”
Lebanese media reported that in retaliation the IDF shelled sites near the
Lebanese border town of Maroun al-Ras but by 6.30PM a tense quiet returned to
the border.
United Nations peacekeepers were reported to be in contact with officials from
both sides in an effort to contain the of violence along the border.
“As UNIFIL is following up on the firing across the Blue Line, UNIFIL Force
Commander and Head of Mission Major General Stefano Del Col is in contact with
the parties urging the maximum restraint and asked to cease all activities
endangering the cessation of hostilities,” UNIFIL said in a statement.
According to Manelis, UNIFIL Commander Maj.-Gen. Stefano Del Col was in Israel
on Sunday morning and met with IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi who told
him Israel’s position on Hezbollah and their precision missile project.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri called
for the intervention of the United States, France and the international
community to stop the escalation along the border.
Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was meeting
with the President of Honduras at the time of the attack, was receiving constant
updates on the situation along the northern border.
According to reports Netanyahu told reporters that “Lebanon will pay the price.”
Israel's enemies, especially Iran, should know that those who seek to destroy it
risk destruction themselves, Netanyahu said earlier on Sunday, amid mounting
tensions with Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza.
Speaking to students on the first day of school in Elkana, Netanyahu said it is
clear today that most of the terrorism Israel faces is organized, sponosred and
funded from one place: Iran. “A new empire has arisen with the goal of defeating
us,” he said. “They build proxies in Lebanon in the form of Hezbollah, in Gaza
in the form of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are trying to entrench themselves
in Iraq to turn it into not only a country through which it can transfer arms to
Syria and Hezbollah, but also to turn it into a launching pad for rockets and
infiltrations against us.”
Netanyahu said that Israel is fighting Iran on all these fronts, and is
determined to prevent it from entrenching itself militarily in the region and
from getting nuclear weapons, “which would unequivocally alter the balance.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin opened his meeting with the Ethiopian president
warning that "we are ready and prepared to protect the citizens of Israel
wherever they may be. We are ready, and we do not want to show you just how
much. Take heed that the quiet can prevail only on both sides of the border."
Earlier on Sunday the Hezbollah affiliated al-Manar news channel reported that
the IDF fired several shells were fired causing fires on the Lebanese side but
no injuries. The Lebanese army reported that an Israeli drone dropped incendiary
material on a forest along the border, sparking a fire. The statement by the
Lebanse Armed Forces said that it was following up on the Israeli violation with
UN peacekeepers.
"A short while ago, fires broke out in the Lebanese border area. The fires
originate with operations by our forces in the area,” the IDF said in a
statement.
Israel’s Northern Command has been on high alert since last week expecting a
limited strike against military targets over strikes in Syria and an alleged
Israeli drone attack in Beirut’s Dahiyeh last week. The military set up
roadblocks on arteries leading north, and has blocked traffic from entering
several towns along the border.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported on Saturday that the IDF launched over
30 flare bombs near the Lebanese border towns of Ghajar, Shebaa and Kfar Shuba
as well and fired heavy machine guns near the villages of al-Semmaqah, al-Alam
and al-Marsad.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said on Saturday evening that the military had also
begun preparing ground, air, naval and intelligence troops for the possibility
of an outbreak of violence in northern Israel, specifically in the Galilee. A
convoy of artillery was seen been moved north by local residents.
In addition to the reinforcement of artillery batteries, Iron Dome missile
defense batteries have been deployed and leave for combat soldiers in the area
has been cancelled. The IDF has also closed the airspace to civilian flights,
closing the civilian airport in Kiryat Shmona and has put the Navy on high alert
for an attack by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The moves are part of the military’s
strengthening of power and readiness in anticipation of any retaliation by the
Lebanese Shiite terror group which it expects against IDF troops or a military
installation along the border.
On Saturday night Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah warned that it
was “ineveitable” that the group will retaliate against Israel which he said
claimed responsibility for attacks on Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.
“Normally, we respond from Shebaa Farms, but this time I wanted to say it would
be open-ended where we would retaliate from. This time it won’t be restricted to
coming from Shebaa,” Nasrallah was quoted as saying by the Hezbollah affiliated
al-Manar Television Channel.
“The first retaliation on the Israeli aggression would be initiating our right
to down Israeli drones.Israel should know that the Lebanese airspace is not open
to its drones and the Resistance will choose the right time and place to target
the Israeli drones in our airspace,” he continued.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi toured the area on Friday and the Head
of the Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Amir Baram warned that Hezbollah and Lebanon
would suffer a “harsh response” to any attack. “You should be preparing not for
Hezbollah’s response against the IDF, but for their response to our response” to
such an attack, Baram said, vowing that “if an IDF soldier is so much as
scratched, our response will be harsh.”
*Herb Keinon contributed
Anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon towards Israeli town: Israeli military
Reuters/Sunday, 1 September 2019
Israel’s military said on Sunday anti-tank missiles from Lebanon targeted an
army base and vehicles and that it responded with fire into southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group said its fighters destroyed an Israeli
military vehicle, killing or wounding those inside. There was no immediate word
from the Israeli military on any casualties. Israel has been on alert for a
possible confrontation with Hezbollah for the past week after drones attacked
what security officials in the region described as a target in a Beirut suburb
linked to precision-guided missile projects. Hezbollah’s leader said late on
Saturday its field commanders were ready to respond to the drone attack, which
he blamed on Israel. Amid the Hezbollah threats, Israel had moved reinforcements
into the border area, which had been largely quiet since both long-time enemies
fought a month-long war in 2006.
In a statement, the Israeli military said several anti-tank missiles were fired
from Lebanon on Sunday and “a number of hits were confirmed.” Hezbollah’s al-Manar
TV says Israeli forces are responding with shelling the border village of Maroun
al-Ras in south Lebanon.
Following the missile attacks, Israelis living near the frontier were instructed
by authorities to stay indoors. Reuters television showed smoke rising along the
frontier, and explosions could be heard. Earlier on Sunday, Lebanese military
said an Israeli drone had dropped incendiary material and sparked a fire in a
pine forest by the border. The fires near the border in Lebanon “originate with
operations by our forces in the area,” the Israeli military said in a statement,
without elaborating. Without claiming responsibility for the drone attack last
week, the Israeli military published what it said were details about an
extensive Iranian-sponsored campaign to provide Hezbollah with the means to
produce precision-guided missiles. Such missiles - which Hezbollah acknowledges
possessing - could potentially pose a counter-balance to Israel’s overwhelming
military force in any future war, with the capacity to home in on and knock out
core infrastructure sites.
Anti-tank Fire From Lebanon Targets Northern Israel,
Israeli Army Says
Jack Khoury and Yaniv Kubovich/Haaretz/August 01/2019
Anti-tank fire emanating from Lebanon was aimed at Israeli territory, the
Israeli military said Sunday afternoon. The army said it was looking into the
incident. Earlier Sunday, the Lebanese army said that an Israeli drone violated
Lebanon's airspace and dropped incendiary material that sparked a fire in a pine
forest by the border.The Lebanese army statement said it was following up with
UN peacekeepers in the area but gave no further details.Other reports from
Lebanon claimed that unmanned aerial vehicles dropped flammables on a grove
nearby known as the Bastra Farm in order to set fire to the place so as to
expose further targets.The Israeli army confirmed fires broke out in the area
due to military action. The Israeli army announced that residents who live up to
four kilometers from the Lebanon border should remain in their homes and open
their shelters, but that there is no need to enter them unless sirens sound. It
also urged locals to cancel all activities along the border.
Over the weekend, illuminating bombs were hurled over the Shebba Farms,
and Lebanese media outlets reported that fires were sparked as a result.
The reported attack comes a day after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah
said that his Shi'ite group will retaliate for drone attacks last week in Beirut
that he has attributed to Israel "in every possible place along the border.""Our
response for last week's events will be [launched from] within Lebanon against
Israeli targets. We usually strike in the area of the Shebba Farms [Mount Dov],"
but this time the group will not limit its attacks on one area, he added.
The Israeli military bolstered troops on the northern border over the
weekend due to concerns that such a retaliatory attack will take place.
The Israeli defense establishment still believes the Shi'ite group is
determined to respond to the attack, but is not interested in sparking a war.
Nonetheless, security forces are preparing for the possibility of a violent
round of fighting that could lead to another strike in Lebanon. Aerial defense
batteries have been deployed in the north to thwart drones and other umanned
aerial vehicles that terror organization may try to launch to attack Israel. The
Israeli army has also instructed that the airspace near the northern border be
closed off. The Israel Navy, meanwhile, is preparing for possible attacks on
Israeli vessels. On Saturday, local residents reported seeing many troops moving
around the area of the Golan Heights, and said they saw tanks and armored
personnel carriers. Illuminating bombs were fired overnight on Friday near the
Druze village of Majdal Shams, and Lebanese media outlets reported that the
bombs had caused fires to break out in the area. The Israeli military began
preparing for a retaliatory attack by Hezbollah following an attack last week,
which the group claimed Israel had carried out: Two explosive-laden drones hit a
machine designed to improve precision missiles, which was being operated in
Dahieh – a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The Israeli defense establishment
assessed that Hezbollah would try to retaliate but would react moderately; the
army minimized patrols along the borders with Lebanon and Syria in order to
avoid presenting possible targets for the group to attack.
Missiles Fired From Lebanon at Israeli Base; Hezbollah Says
Destroyed Military Vehicle
Jack Khoury, Yaniv Kubovich and Noa Shpigel /Haaretz/September 01/2019
Lebanese army says Israel shelled southern Lebanon territory ■ Hezbollah claims
Israelis killed ■ Incident comes after Nasrallah threatened to attack
Several anti-tank missiles were fired from Lebanon Sunday at an Israeli army
base and military vehicles in Israel's north, the Israeli army said, adding that
"some targets" were hit.
Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen TV said that Hezbollah has destroyed an Israeli military
vehicle near the border, and that the strike "killed and wounded those inside,"
but the Israeli military later stated that there were no Israeli casualties.
The Israeli military returned fire at the sources of the strike and at targets
in southern Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces said , later adding that over 100
targets in Lebanon were hit and that after several hours the exchanges of fire
have ended.
Lebanon map.
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has called on U.S. Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo and French President Emmanuel Macron to "intervene immediately" to
de-escalate the situation, Hariri's office said.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin opened his meeting with the Ethiopian president
with a message to Hezbollah, saying that it is known to all those wishing to
harm Israel that "We are ready and prepared to protect the citizens of Israel
wherever they may be. We are ready, and we do not want to show you just how
much." He added, "Take heed that the quiet can prevail only on both sides of the
border."
The Lebanese army said that Israel fired more than 40 shells at border villages,
causing blazes, and that the shelling that continued into the evening. The army
did not report on Lebanese casaulties.
According to reports in Lebanese media, there was fire in the Maroun al-Ras
area, on the Israeli border. The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV channel
reported that Israeli artillery strikes in the area are ongoing.
Across the border, residents of the Israeli communities of Avivim and Yiron
reported hearing explosions. Avivim resident Eliezer Biton told Haaretz that
exchanges of fire continue. "The community is locked down. Everyone is in
shelters or protected rooms," he said, speaking from his shelter. He was near
the border, across from Maroun al-Ras, when the first strike took place. "We
were ready for it. There's been tension in past days," he said.
Hezbollah announced that at a quarter past four on Sunday, one of its cells "hit
an Israeli armored vehicle near Avivim and killed and wounded those inside."
Israeli defense sources say Hezbollah’s offensive, which included missile fire
at tanks and other military targets all at once, was designed to make it
difficult for the IDF to respond immediately.
The Israeli army instructed municipalities near the border to open their
shelters, and announced that residents who live up to four kilometers from the
Lebanon border should remain in their homes and enter shelters if sirens sound.
It also urged locals to cancel all activities along the border, including
farming and children's activities.
At Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, the helipad has been opened.
The IDF has set up roadblocks on arteries leading north, and is blocking traffic
from entering northern towns.
Earlier Sunday, the Lebanese army said that an Israeli drone violated Lebanon's
airspace and dropped incendiary material that sparked a fire in a pine forest by
the border.
The Lebanese army statement said it was following up with UN peacekeepers in the
area but gave no further details.
Other reports from Lebanon claimed that unmanned aerial vehicles dropped
flammables on a grove nearby known as the Bastra Farm in order to set fire to
the place so as to expose further targets.
The Israeli army confirmed fires broke out in the area due to military action.
Over the weekend, illuminating bombs were hurled over the Shebba Farms, and
Lebanese media outlets reported that fires were sparked as a result.
The reported attack comes a day after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said
that his Shi'ite group will retaliate for drone attacks last week in Beirut that
he has attributed to Israel "in every possible place along the border."
"Our response for last week's events will be [launched from] within Lebanon
against Israeli targets. We usually strike in the area of the Shebba Farms
[Mount Dov]," but this time the group will not limit its attacks on one area, he
added.
The Israeli military bolstered troops on the northern border over the weekend
due to concerns that such a retaliatory attack will take place.
The Israeli defense establishment still believes the Shi'ite group is determined
to respond to the attack, but is not interested in sparking a war. Nonetheless,
security forces are preparing for the possibility of a violent round of fighting
that could lead to another strike in Lebanon. Aerial defense batteries have been
deployed in the north to thwart drones and other umanned aerial vehicles that
terror organization may try to launch to attack Israel. The Israeli army has
also instructed that the airspace near the northern border be closed off. The
Israel Navy, meanwhile, is preparing for possible attacks on Israeli vessels.
On Saturday, local residents reported seeing many troops moving around the area
of the Golan Heights, and said they saw tanks and armored personnel carriers.
Illuminating bombs were fired overnight on Friday near the Druze village of
Majdal Shams, and Lebanese media outlets reported that the bombs had caused
fires to break out in the area. The Israeli military began preparing for a
retaliatory attack by Hezbollah following an attack last week, which the group
claimed Israel had carried out: Two explosive-laden drones hit a machine
designed to improve precision missiles, which was being operated in Dahieh – a
Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The Israeli defense establishment assessed that
Hezbollah would try to retaliate but would react moderately; the army minimized
patrols along the borders with Lebanon and Syria in order to avoid presenting
possible targets for the group to attack.
Hariri Asks Pompeo, French Presidency to Rein in Israel
after Hizbullah Attack
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Sunday urged the United States and France to
"intervene" after Hizbullah traded cross-border fire with Israel. Hariri
contacted U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and French President Emmanuel
Macron's diplomatic adviser to ask for intervention by their countries "and the
international community in facing the developments on the southern border,"
Hariri's office said in a statement. Hariri later contacted President Michel
Aoun and informed him of the international contacts he made. He also called the
Army Commander, General Joseph Aoun, who informed him of the measures taken by
the army. Hariri later received a phone call from Egyptian Foreign Minister
Sameh Shoukry during which the flare-up was discussed. The premier also called
Speaker Nabih Berri and put him in the picture of the phone talks he held with
Arab and international officials. Hizbullah earlier said it had destroyed an
Israeli military vehicle across the border and caused casualties, prompting
retaliatory fire from the Israeli army. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and the Israeli army later announced that the attack did not cause any
casualties and that the exchange of fire had ended.
Hizbullah Attacks Israeli Vehicle, Netanyahu Says No
Casualties
Agence France Presse/Associated Press/Naharnet/August 01/2019
Hizbullah announced Sunday it destroyed an Israeli military vehicle and killed
and wounded those inside, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed
that the attack did not cause any casualties. Israeli army spokesman Avichay
Adraee said Israel retaliated to the operation by striking the "attack cell",
firing around 100 shells on south Lebanon and launching a number of helicopter
raids. Another spokesman said in the evening that the exchange of fire was
likely over and that there were no Israeli casualties despite damage on the
Israeli side. "The tactical event near Avivim, the exchange of fire, is most
likely over," Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus told journalists,
adding that a military ambulance was hit in the escalation. Prior to the Israeli
announcements, video and picture footage had emerged of Israeli ambulances and
helicopters apparently transferring wounded soldiers to hospitals. Hizbullah's
al-Manar television said the attack caused "four Israeli casualties," noting
that the Wolf-type vehicle usually fits eight personnel. The Israeli army had
earlier confirmed that Israeli targets were "hit.""A number of anti-tank
missiles were fired from Lebanon towards an (Israeli military) base and military
vehicles," the army said. "A number of hits have been confirmed. (Israel's
military) is responding with fire towards the sources of fire and targets in
southern Lebanon," the Israeli army added. The Israeli shelling concentrated on
areas close to the border near the villages of Maroun el-Ras and Yaroun,
triggering some fires. The Lebanese Army said Israel fired 40 shells into the
south of the country. Hizbullah meanwhile claimed responsibility for the attack
in a statement, saying "the group of the martyrs Hassan Zbeeb and Yasser Daher
destroyed a military vehicle on the road of the Avivim barracks" in northern
Israel, "killing and wounding those who were inside" the vehicle. Zbeeb and
Daher had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Syria's Aqraba region on August
24. Israel has been bracing for a possible attack by Hizbullah in response to
the deadly strike and to a drone explosion blamed on Israel in Beirut's southern
suburbs. Israel and Hizbullah are bitter enemies that fought a monthlong war in
2006 that ended in a stalemate. Despite their deep hostility, they have largely
refrained from direct fighting for the past 13 years. The Israeli military said
it had encouraged residents near the northern border with Lebanon to stay
indoors and ordered public bomb shelters to open.
Del Cole: To stop all activities threatening the cessation
of hostilities
NNA -Sun 01 Sep 2019
UNIFIL Spokesperson Andrea Tenenti announced Sunday that the UNIFIL command is
following up on the "shooting across the Blue Line," while at the same time its
Head of Mission and Commander-in-Chief, Major General Stefano del Cole, is in
contact with the parties concerned and urges them to exercise maximum restraint,
demanding the halting of all activities that endanger the cessation of
hostilities.
UNIFIL Urges 'Restraint' after Hizbullah Attack, Israeli
Shelling
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon urged "maximum restraint"
after Hizbullah traded fire with Israel across the border on Sunday, a spokesman
said. "UNIFIL is following up on the firing across the Blue Line" between
Lebanon and Israel, said Andrea Tenenti, spokesman for the U.N. Interim Force in
Lebanon. UNIFIL chief "Major General Stefano Del Col is in contact with the
parties urging the maximum restraint and asked to cease all activities," he told
AFP.
Israel Fires Shells on Shebaa Farms as Drone Sets Forest Ablaze
Naharnet/August 01/2019
The Israeli army on Sunday fired several 155mm shells on the Jabal al-Rous area
in the occupied Shebaa Farms and Kfarshouba Hills, Lebanon’s National News
Agency reported. It said the Israelis opened fire from their posts in the al-Zaoura
area in Syria’s occupied Golan Heights.
An Israeli drone meanwhile dropped flammable material on a pine forest in
Lebanon’s Bustra Farm, sparking a blaze, TV networks said. “Residents from the
towns of Shebaa, Halta and Kfarshouba are trying to put out the fire,” NNA said,
adding that Israeli forces had also dropped similar incendiary bombs on Jabal
al-Rous.“Enemy forces are burning the forests in the Shebaa Farms to thwart the
possibility of infiltration,” the agency added. Later on Sunday, Israeli forces
fired heavy-caliber machineguns inside the Shebaa Farms as several blasts echoed
from the Farms’ western edge, NNA said. Separately, the Israeli army resumed
drilling works and the erection of sand barriers opposite Lebanon’s al-Wazzani
park. Armored patrols were meanwhile roaming a road behind the sand barricade
amid drone overflights over the towns and villages of the Marjeyoun district.
Israeli forces had overnight fired a number of flares over the al-Abbad area
facing the border town of Houla. The developments come amid high tensions
between Israel and Hizbullah in connection with the Israeli attacks last Sunday
in Syria and Lebanon and Hizbullah’s pledge to retaliate.
Israeli FM Slams Nasrallah as 'Iranian Puppet'
Naharnet/August 01/2019
Pope Francis said Sunday he was late to his weekly Israeli Foreign Minister
Israel Katz on Sunday described Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as an
“Iranian puppet,” hours after the Hizbullah leader reiterated that his group
will retaliate against Israel over a deadly airstrike in Syria and a drone
explosion over Beirut’s southern suburbs. “Nasrallah is an Iranian puppet who
has taken charge of the file of the Iranian attack that had been planned from
Syria, and most probably he had not been aware of it,” Katz tweeted in Arabic.
“Meanwhile he is promoting to Lebanon’s residents tales about defending Lebanon.
If he stays on this course, he will be remembered as someone who destroyed
Lebanon,” the Israeli minister warned. Last Sunday's drone attack in Beirut’s
southern suburbs came just hours after Israel launched strikes in neighboring
Syria to prevent what it said was an impending Iranian drone attack on Israeli
territory. Hizbullah said two of its fighters were killed in those strikes and
Nasrallah vowed retaliation. In his Saturday speech, Nasrallah vowed to
retaliate "at all costs" and target Israeli drones, which often operate in
Lebanese airspace. "The response will be open... from Lebanon," he said, "in the
Shebaa Farms or anywhere on the border."The timing and scale of Hezbollah's
response, he added, was in the hands of field commanders.
On Israel's Borders, Drone Rivalries Play Out
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
Pope Francis said Sunday he was late to his weekly
Long a pioneer in drone technology, Israel today sees its superiority challenged
by Iran and its ally Hizbullah which are also developing military UAVs.
The past week has illustrated the complex and shifting dynamics. On August 24,
Israel struck what it said was an attempt to stop an Iranian force from
launching a cross-border drone attack from a Syrian village. A day later, two
drones which Lebanon said were Israeli crashed in the southern suburbs of the
Lebanese capital Beirut, an area dominated by Israel's longtime foe Hizbullah.
The Lebanese Army later fired at a number of Israeli drones over the southern
border. On Saturday, Hizullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah vowed that Israel
"must pay a price" for the August 25 strike.On Sunday, Iran unveiled what it
said was a new reconnaissance and attack drone with a range of more than 1,000
kilometers. Meanwhile in Iraq, Israel has been accused of being behind several
attacks and drone sightings against a paramilitary group. Israel has not
confirmed its involvement. Israel also has not claimed responsibility for the
drones found in Beirut's suburbs but accused Hizbullah of making precision
missiles in the neighborhood, allegations that may well have been formulated
with the help of drone surveillance. Israel's use of unmanned aircraft for
gathering information is hardly new. In 1982, during a war in Lebanon, Israel
was equipped with drones. After the October war of 1973, in which neighboring
Arab states caught Israel unaware, it began developing drones to gather
real-time information on its rivals."In the first Lebanon war, in 1982, the
system was operational. It was a surveillance system -- real-time, optical
intelligence by camera," French-Israeli David Hariri, who led the project, told
AFP. They were gradually fitted with infrared cameras, lasers to identify
specific targets and electromagnetic intelligence systems, Hariri, often dubbed
the father of Israeli drones, added. "The soldiers had been ordered to use them
but they were a bit of mockery -- 'what are we going to do with a small plane
like that?'" he recalled.Things changed after they showed their value on the
battlefield, he said.
Harari said Israel was the first country to create such a national drone program
in its military.
Drone 'nation'
Israel, self-dubbed the "start-up nation", has developed its sector and is now a
leading light in the global UAV market. Today, about 50 local start-ups are
working on drone prototypes, according to Israel's economy ministry, which says
the industry is worth billions. Israel was the leading global exporter of drones
between 2005 to 2013, according to a study by a specialist firm. But the drone
industry is moving fast with miniaturization, the commercialization of low-cost
recreational devices and new players like China, Russia and Iran challenging
U.S. and Israeli dominance. "We were the first ones, that is true, but (today)
everybody is using them,” Uzi Rubin, former head of Israel's missile defense and
now an analyst with the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said.
Smaller drones flying at low altitudes can carry explosive charges and attack
military bases or other strategic sites. "This is a threat to any military
because it can drop explosives very accurately on key sensitive installations,"
Rubin said.
Rivals
Israeli companies such as Skylock and Elbit are developing technologies to take
remote control of drones without damaging them, enabling them to recover data
from the devices. In October 2012, what was believed to be an Iranian
surveillance drone sent by Hizbullah traveled over the Mediterranean to fly for
half an hour over the Negev desert, where Israeli nuclear installations are
allegedly located, before being shot down. And last year, Israel accused Iran of
flying a drone in its airspace on an attack mission. Iranian drone development
has given its Lebanese ally Hizbullah access to new air intelligence and attack
capabilities, Israeli researcher Liran Antebi recently noted. The war between
Israel and Hizbullah in 2006 was the first in history when the number of flight
hours of unmanned aircraft was higher than that by manned, according to a study
by the University of Tel Aviv. But at the time, the drones were overwhelmingly
Israeli. While Israel retains its technological superiority, "Hizbullah is
becoming more and more of a military organization that is equipped with advanced
weapon systems such as both military and commercial UAVs," Antebi wrote. To its
fleet of drones Hizbullah may add anti-drone systems, its leader Sayyed Hassan
Nasrallah recently claimed. "Whenever Israeli drones enter Lebanon's airspace,
we will try to shoot them down," he said this week, promising that the days when
Israeli drones flew over Lebanon unhindered were over.
Drones Banned over Several Lebanese Areas for Ashoura
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
The Lebanese Army said Sunday it will ban drones over majority Shiite areas
during the ten days of the Shiite Ashoura commemoration, following tensions with
Israel over an alleged drone attack last week. Hizbullah has vowed that Israel
"must pay a price" for what it says was a drone strike on one of its
strongholds, the southern suburbs of Beirut. "The army's command warns all
citizens against the use of drones throughout the duration of Ashoura
commemorations in the following areas: the southern suburbs of Beirut, Nabatieh,
Tyre and Baalbek-Hermel," it said in a statement. Ashoura is one of the holiest
events in Shiite Islam and it commemorates the seventh century killing of
Prophet Mohammed's grandson Imam Hussein. This year's commemorations come amid
soaring tensions with Israel, which is accused of flying two explosive-laden
drones over the capital's southern suburbs on August 25. Hizbullah said the
pre-dawn drone attack "hit a specific area," without elaborating on the nature
of the target. Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday his group's
response to the incident had been "decided."
"The need for a response is decided," he said during a televised speech, adding
it was about "establishing the rules of engagement and... the logic of
protection for the country."Israel "must pay a price," he said. He vowed to
retaliate "at all costs" and target Israeli drones, which often operate in
Lebanese airspace. In a rare incident on Wednesday, the Lebanese Army opened
fire on Israeli drones that had violated Lebanon's airspace, forcing the
aircraft to return across the border. Israel and Hizbullah have fought several
wars, the most recent a 33-day conflict in 2006, which killed 1,200 people in
Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
Lebanese Army Says Israeli Drone Drops Incendiary Material
in South
Asharq Al-Awsat/Sunday, 1 September, 2019
The Lebanese army announced Sunday that an Israeli drone breached Lebanon’s
airspace and dropped incendiary material in the South.
The material was dropped above Bastra Farm and caused a fire in a forest on the
border. The army said it was following up on the development with the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The Israeli
military said: "A short while ago, fires broke out in the Lebanese border area.
The fires originate with operations by our forces in the area."Tensions between
Lebanon and Israel have been high throughout the week after two suspected
Israeli drones went down in Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs
on August 25. The Lebanese army and Iran-backed Hezbollah said one exploded and
one crashed, causing damage to Hezbollah’s media center. A security official in
the region has described the target of the drone strikes as linked to
precision-guided missile projects.Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate. On Saturday,
the Israeli military said it had ordered extra forces to deploy its northern
command.
Nasrallah: We Will Retaliate for Drone Attacks Everywhere
We Can Along Border With Israel
Yaniv Kubovich, Noa Shpigel and Jack Khoury/Haaretz/August
31/2019
Military restricts movement and sends backup troops as it braces for retaliation
after Hezbollah blames Israel for drone strikes
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on Saturday that his Shi'ite group will
retaliate for drone attacks last week in Beirut that he has attributed to Israel
"in every possible place along the border.""Our response for last week's events
will be [launched from] within Lebanon against Israeli targets. We usually
strike in the area of the Shebba Farms [Mount Dov]," but this time the group
will not limit its attacks on one area, he added. The Israeli military bolstered
troops on the northern border over the weekend over the concern that such a
retaliatory attack will take place. The movement of combat soldiers in the area
has been restricted, and extra battalions have been brought in as reinforcement
alongside armored corps and artillery corps soldiers already stationed there.
The Israeli defense establishment still believes the Shi'ite group is determined
to respond to the attack, but is not interested in sparking a war. Nonetheless,
security forces are preparing for the possibility of a violent round of fighting
that could lead to another strike in Lebanon. Aerial defense batteries have been
deployed in the north to thwart drones and other umanned aerial vehicles that
terror organization may try to launch to attack Israel. The Israeli army has
also instructed that the airspace near the northern border be closed off. The
Israel Navy, meanwhile, is preparing for possible attacks on Israeli vessels. On
Saturday, local residents reported seeing many troops moving around the area of
the Golan Heights, and said they saw tanks and armored personnel carriers.
Illuminating bombs were fired overnight on Friday near the Druze village of
Majdal Shams, and Lebanese media outlets reported that the bombs had caused
fires to break out in the area. The Israeli military began preparing for a
retaliatory attack by Hezbollah following an attack Sunday morning, which the
group claimed Israel had carried out: Two explosive-laden drones hit a machine
designed to improve precision missiles, which was being operated in Dahieh – a
Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The Israeli defense establishment assessed that
Hezbollah would try to retaliate but would react moderately; the army minimized
patrols along the borders with Lebanon and Syria in order to avoid presenting
possible targets for the group to attack.Earlier this week, Nasrallah called the
crashed drones a clear display of aggression by Israel, the first since the
Second Lebanon War in 2006. He added that the Israel Defense Forces should
expect an immediate response. Hezbollah's conflict with Israel is entering a new
phase, Nasrallah said, and the group will down any Israeli unmanned aircraft in
Lebanese airspace.Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Kassem added
afterwards that the group will respond to the drone attack in Beirut
unexpectedly, but that they are not interested in war with Israel. Lebanese
President Michel Aoun said that the drone strikes amount to a "declaration of
war," and that Lebanon has the right to defend its sovereignty in light of the
attack. On Wednesday, the Lebanese army announced that it shot at three IDF
drones that entered Lebanese territory. In an exceptional move, the Israeli
military revealed Thursday details about Hezbollah's project to increase the
accuracy of its missiles, aided by Iran's Quds Force, which has been accelerated
in past months. According to the IDF, they publicized the project in order to
deny Hezbollah the opportunity to hide the project's site in Lebanon.The timing
of the revelation may be intended to send a message to Hezbollah that if it
responds to the last attacks attributed to Israel, the missile accuracy project
may take the hit. The IDF believes that revealing the site of the project will
give legitimacy to Israel to strike them in the event of tension between Israel
and Hezbollah, and hope that Arab countries will act to stop the project. During
the last round of escalations between the two sides, in 2015, Hezbollah launched
anti-tank missiles at a hillside of Mount Dov, killing an IDF officer and
soldier. The missile attack was a response to strikes attributed to Israel in
the Syrian Golan, which killed senior Hezbollah leader Jihad Mughniyeh and an
Iranian general.
Geagea: Without LF's martyrs, we would not have been here,
nor would there have been Maarab or Baabda!
NNA - Sun 01 Sep 2019
Lebanese Forces Party Chief, Samir Geagea, paid tribute Sunday to the fallen
martyrs of the Lebanese Resistance, saying that "without their sacrifices, we
would not have been here nor would there have been Maarab or Baabda, or a state
or a rule or government...!"
Speaking during a Mass service held by the LF Party in Maarab in commemoration
of its fallen martyrs, Geagea said, "The Lebanese Forces exists through sweat,
blood, struggle, steadfastness, integrity and sacrifices," adding, "Our
political presence on the ground or in any position of responsibility we assume
is due to the blood of our martyrs and the sweat of our fighters."Touching on
the domestic scene, Geagea said: "We have taken the step of electing General
Michel Aoun as President of the Republic to put an end to the persistent
presidential vacuum that dismantles the state, to secure balance in the
constitutional institutions, and to achieve historical reconciliation between
the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement through the Maarab
Understanding, which is a real partnership agreement between the two largest
Christian parties and not an agreement to share quotas as some wish to describe
it."
"But not all wishes can be realized," Geagea went on, regretting the negation of
the Maarab agreement obligations, "as if the other party wanted it just to reach
the presidency!" he said. "The attempts to isolate and besiege the Lebanese
Forces are not new to us, but are inherent to our historical journey," he went
on. "The most precious of its possessions, besides its national balance and the
legacy of its martyrs, wounded and the forcibly disappearing inside al-Assad's
prisons, is its dignity, word, duty, integrity and credibility towards its
people and itself," Geagea proudly asserted.
"Unfortunately, the mandate that we desired to be a restoration of the state
from the statelet, and still do, has not been up to our aspirations," the LF
Chief sadly noted. "The strong state that we wanted to establish through this
mandate is now losing more and more of its balance and the elements of its
existence," Geagea said. "The Lebanese are deprived of having a state due to the
existence of a state within the state, one that confiscates the strategic
decision, and establishes an economy in parallel and does not hesitate to resort
to denounced violent means to try to subdue its opponents," underlined Geagea.
"Some groups that were critical of the abnormal practices within the state of
theft, waste, corruption, favoritism and family succession eventually followed
suit when they came to power," he added.
On the regional scene, the LF Chief emphasized that "Lebanon's commitment to the
Arab-Israeli conflict is a given, based on our belief in the justice of the
Palestinian cause on one hand, and the principle of Arab solidarity and the
existence of Lebanon within the Arab League on the other hand."
"We do not understand according to what bases and standards does one of the
Lebanese parties today wish to plunge Lebanon and its people into the
confrontation between the United States and Iran?" questioned Geagea. "It is
unacceptable for Lebanon to be put at risk of a devastating war it has nothing
to do with," he maintained. "What remains of the state's authority and the
elements of its strong mandate if the first and last strategic decision lies in
the hands of parties outside the state's institutions?" wondered Geagea.
Consequently, he called on the President of the Republic "to take a clear,
decisive and transparent position on this matter, in parallel with raising the
issue before the Council of Ministers and addressing a letter to the Parliament
Council to assume their responsibilities in this regard." Over the Syrian
displacement issue, Geagea said, "There are two immediate solutions to the
Syrian refugee crisis: either to establish a safe area in Syria with direct
Russian protection and UN supervision, or to distribute the Syrian refugees
among Arab countries which would not be affected neither socially nor
economically."
AlRahi calls for consolidating the rule of law and
institutions in the country
NNA - Sun 01 Sep 2019
Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, highlighted Sunday the
need to strengthen the rule of law and institutions in the country, instead of
having a state where quotas are shared between political parties and
parliamentary blocs. Speaking during his religious sermon while presiding over a
Mass service to consecrate the Church of Saint Simon in Qlayaat - Keserwan
earlier today, the Patriarch stressed that "this country cannot thrive with one
group eliminating the other, for the exclusion of one side is contrary to
Lebanon's pluralistic identity and undermines the foundations of reconciliation
and national unity." At the political level, the Patriarch stressed the need for
integrity and fairness to prevail in the service of public administration and
public finances. "If political morality is not observed, the basis for political
coexistence would then fall, and every aspect of coexistence would gradually be
endangered and eliminated," he said. At the socio-economic level, al-Rahi
affirmed that "it is a duty to avoid injustices and corruption, and to protect
social justice and the rights of others, and promote human dignity and
solidarity ties.""This sacred occasion is a chance to raise the question of what
acts of goodness can a person do to inherit eternal life?" said the Patriarch,
adding that this question relates to the moral cause, as well as the true
meaning of personal life and supreme goodness.
The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News
published on September 01-02/2019
Iran unveils new reconnaissance and attack
drone
AFP, Tehran/Sunday, 1 September 2019
Iran on Sunday unveiled a jet-propelled drone it said is capable of finding and
attacking targets far from the country’s borders with precision. Dubbed the “Kian,”
the unmanned aerial vehicle was designed, produced and tested by experts of the
air defense force within about a year, said the head of the force, Brigadier
General Alireza Sabahifard. The drone comes in two models capable of
“surveillance and reconnaissance missions and continuous flight for precision
missions,” state news agency IRNA quoted him as saying. “This drone can
undertake any drone missions we entrust it with... it can fly more than 1,000
kilometers (620 miles) and find its target with precision,” he said. The newly
launched UAV can carry different munitions and can climb to an altitude of 5,000
meters (15,000 feet), according to state television. “This unmanned aircraft is
capable of hitting targets far from the country’s borders and undertaking air
defense from the enemy’s territory,” said Sabahifard. The unveiling comes at a
time of rising tensions with the United States, which have escalated since last
year when US President Donald Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran
and re-imposed sanctions.
Iran shot down a US Global Hawk drone with a surface-to-air missile in June for
allegedly violating its airspace, an accusation the United States denies.
Iranian Oil Tanker Pursued by US Approaches Syria
Asharq Al-Awsat/Sunday, 1 September, 2019
An Iranian oil tanker pursued by the US is off the coast of Syria, showed the
ship-tracking website MarineTraffic.com.
The Adrian Darya 1, formerly known as the Grace 1, slowed to a near-stop on
Sunday some 50 nautical miles (92 kilometers) off Syria.
The ship still does not list a destination for its 2.1 million barrels of oil,
worth some $130 million. The US Treasury Department on Friday blacklisted the
tanker, which was detained by Britain off Gibraltar in July due to British
suspicion it was carrying Iranian oil to Syria in violation of European Union
sanctions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused the United States on
Twitter of engaging in “piracy and threats” to stop Tehran selling oil to
traditional clients. Turkey said on Friday the tanker was headed to Lebanon’s
waters, but the United States later said the ship was sailing to Syria.
While Iran has denied selling the oil to its ally Damascus, experts said the
likely scenario was for a ship-to-ship transfer, with a Syrian port as the final
destination. Syria, which has ports on the Mediterranean, is under a raft of US
and European sanctions over its eight-year conflict.
Meanwhile, Iran's deputy foreign minister and economists are to travel to Paris
on Monday to speak with French officials.
Rouhani Warns Macron of Looming Nuclear Step
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
President Hassan Rouhani spoke with French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on
Saturday, warning him Iran would take the next step in reducing its nuclear
commitments unless Europe lives up to its own undertakings. Tensions have spiked
in the Gulf since May last year when President Donald Trump unilaterally
withdrew the US from a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers -- known
formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The escalation has
seen ships attacked, drones downed and tankers seized in the Strait of Hormuz, a
chokepoint for around a third of the world's sea-borne oil. At the height of the
crisis, Trump ordered strikes against Iran on June 21 before cancelling them at
the last minute. Macron has been leading efforts to de-escalate the situation,
and expressed hopes at a G7 meeting last week of bringing Rouhani and Trump
together for a meeting. But Rouhani has played down the likelihood of that
happening unless the United States first lifts crippling sanctions that it has
slapped on Iran since pulling out of the deal. "If Europe cannot operationalize
its commitments, Iran will take its third step to reduce its JCPOA commitments,"
Rouhani told Macron in a phone call, quoted by the government website. However,
"this step, just like the other ones, will be reversible," he added.
"Unfortunately after this unilateral move by the US, European countries did not
take concrete measures to implement their commitments."The contents of JCPOA are
unchangeable and all parties must be committed to its contents," he said.
Rouhani said Iran had two priorities: for all parties to the JCPOA to fully
implement their obligations and "securing the safety of all free maritime
transportation in all waterways including the Persian Gulf and Strait of
Hormuz."
Economic delegation
In a statement from his office, Macron stressed the importance of "the current
dynamic to create the conditions for a de-escalation through dialogue and
building a durable solution in the region."A French diplomatic source said it
was important, after recent discussions between Paris and Tehran, to establish
that Rouhani was "still ready to negotiate. And that is the case". Twelve months
after the US pulled out of the nuclear deal, Iran began reducing its commitments
under the accord. The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy
Agency, said Friday that just over 10 percent of Iran's uranium stockpile was
now enriched up to 4.5 percent, above the 3.67 percent limit stipulated in the
2015 deal. It also said Iran's total stockpile of uranium, which under the
accord should be no more than the equivalent of 300 kilograms (661 pounds) of
uranium hexafluoride, now stood at roughly 360 kilograms. Iran has not specified
what its third step might be in reducing its commitments to the deal. Foreign
Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Tuesday in an interview with the
Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that the step would be taken on September 6.
Rouhani's chief of staff Mahmoud Vaezi said the third step would be taken "in
the event Iran's demands are not met.""A committee decides the third step and we
will decide... two or three days prior to the deadline," he said late Saturday,
quoted by state news agency IRNA. Vaezi said Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas
Araghchi would head an Iranian economic delegation travelling to France on
Monday to discuss proposals aimed at salvaging the nuclear deal. Macron has
urged the US to offer some sort of relief to Iran, such as lifting sanctions on
oil sales to China and India, or a new credit line to enable exports in return
for its compliance with the nuclear deal.
Russia Says US Strikes on Syria's Idlib Violate Agreements
Asharq Al-Awsat/Sunday, 1 September, 2019
Russia accused the United States on Sunday of breaching agreements when it
carried out airstrikes on Syria’s Idlib region a day earlier.
On Saturday the US Central Command, part of the Department of Defense, had said
that US forces struck an al-Qaeda facility north of Idlib in Syria in an attack
aimed at the organization’s leadership. TASS news agency, citing the Russian
defense ministry, said Washington had forewarned neither Russia nor Turkey about
the strikes. It added that Russian and Syrian regime warplanes had not carried
out raids in the region recently.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said airstrikes pounded bases belonging
to extremist fighters in Syria’s northwest.
The UK-based monitor said the strikes, near the town of Maarat Misrin in Idlib
province, killed more than 40 militants, including some commanders.
Interfax news agency cited Russian military as saying that the United States
carried out airstrikes in the region between Maarat Misrin and Kafer Haya in
Idlib on Saturday. US airstrikes have hit a number of Nusra commanders in
northwest Syria in recent years. Syrian regime airstrikes on the extremist-run
Idlib region had stopped on Saturday, after the regime agreed to a Russia-backed
ceasefire following four months of deadly bombardment, the monitor said. The
Idlib ceasefire brings temporary respite after a crushing offensive by Syrian
troops in the last remaining opposition stronghold in the country. The offensive
began April 30 and intensified in recent weeks, forcing hundreds of thousands to
flee, many of whom were already displaced.The UN said more than 450 civilians have been killed.
A similar ceasefire at the beginning of the month lasted a few days, after which
the regime assault resumed and forces captured the Idlib town of Khan Sheikhoun
and all opposition-held towns and villages in nearby Hama province.
Syrian Democratic Council: We Asked Moscow to Resume Negotiations with Damascus
Qamishli (Northeastern Syria) - Kamal Sheikho/Asharq Al-Awsat/Sunday, 1
September, 2019
Ilham Ahmed, the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) - the political
arm of the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) - warned
Turkey against its military buildup near Syria’s borders and its continued
threats of hostility. Turkey, who considers the SDF to be a terrorist
organization, has long threatened cross-border attacks to "end" the group's
presence in Syria.
"If it carries out its threat, it could spread chaos and bring instability to
Turkey itself," Ahmed told Asharq Al-Awsat in an interview in Qamishli, a city
in northeastern Syria on the border with Turkey.
"We have shown flexibility in dealing with understandings aiming to lay the
foundations for a sustainable peace process with Turkey and to maintain the
security of both sides of the border," Ahmed added.
"But instead of keeping its military buildup reasonably away from the border,
Turkey started launching threats again," she noted, saying that such behavior
suggests implicit hostility and a hidden desire to invade northern and eastern
Syria. A delegation from the SDC had met with Russian officials based at the
Hmeimim air base in mid-August. According to Ahmed, they were able to
communicate developments concerning Syria.
"We asked the Russians to invite the Syrian regime to begin a comprehensive
political process for resolving the Syrian crisis and to recognize the
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and its military forces,"
Ahmed said. SDC representatives had held official talks with Damascus back in
mid-2017, based on demand from the Syrian regime. But the initiative soon fell
apart as the regime insisted on regaining full control over the
Kurdish-controlled autonomous region. "This vision does not serve the political
solution and the peace process," Ahmed emphasized, explaining that it could
trigger fresh waves of internal displacement.
Russia Accuses U.S. of Risking Idlib Truce with Strike on
Jihadists
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
Russia accused the United States Sunday of having "compromised" a fragile
ceasefire in the Syrian province of Idlib by launching a missile strike against
jihadist leaders there. The Americans hit the region "without advance notice to
Russia or Turkey," which both have troops on the ground in Idlib, the Russian
military said. It described the attack as "indiscriminate."The strike caused
"great losses and destruction," the Russian defense ministry added in a
statement, accusing Washington of having "compromised the ceasefire in the
de-escalation zone of Idlib."The U.S. strike, which targeted leaders of al-Qaida
in Syria, killed at least 40 jihadists, according to the Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights. It came as renewed Syrian regime bombardment of Idlib killed a
civilian in the first violation of a Russian-backed truce for the region that
came into effect just hours before. Syrian government air strikes on the
jihadist-run Idlib region had halted earlier Saturday, after the regime agreed
to a Moscow-backed ceasefire following four months of deadly bombardment that
killed more than 950 civilians, the monitor said. Saturday's truce is the second
such agreement between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and jihadists
since August 1. The Idlib region is home to some three million people, nearly
half of whom have been displaced from other parts of Syria. The United Nations
says the violence there has displaced more than 400,000 people.
Netanyahu Repeats Pledge to Annex Israeli Settlements in Occupied West Bank
Asharq Al-Awsat/Sunday, 1 September, 2019
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to annex all Israeli
settlements in the occupied West Bank, he said on Sunday, reiterating an
election promise made five months ago but again giving no timeframe.
Settlements are one of the most heated issues in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Palestinians have voiced fears Netanyahu could defy international
consensus and move ahead with annexation with possible backing from US President
Donald Trump, a close ally. “With God’s help we will
extend Jewish sovereignty to all the settlements as part of the (biblical) land
of Israel, as part of the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said in Sunday’s speech in
the West Bank settlement of Elkana, where he attended a ceremony opening the
school year. He did not say when he planned to make
such a move. Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Netanyahu’s announcement was a
“continuation of attempts to create an unacceptable fait accompli that will not
lead to any peace, security or stability”.Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, called
on the international community to take action after Netanyahu's comments.
"Those who claim concern after every Israeli settlement announcement should face
reality: Israel's PM is announcing further annexation of occupied territory," he
wrote on Twitter.
"Enough impunity: There´s an international responsibility to impose sanctions on
Israel after decades of systematic crimes."
Netanyahu, who heads the right-wing Likud party, made a similar pledge days
before an Israeli general election in April. After the vote, he failed to form a
governing parliamentary majority and the country will hold a new election on
September 17. His reaffirmation of the annexation promise came amid a campaign
push to draw supporters of far-right factions to Likud in the coming election,
in which votes are cast for a party’s list of parliamentary candidates.
In power for the past decade, but with corruption charges looming, Netanyahu has
cautioned that Likud needs to emerge with a decisive lead in the ballot or
Israel’s president might choose another candidate to form a governing coalition
after the race. Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing in three criminal
investigations against him. Likud is running neck-and-neck in opinion polls with
the centrist Blue and White party led by former armed forces chief Benny Gantz.
With publication of a US peace plan still pending, Trump has already recognized
Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, land captured from Syria in the
1967 Middle East war.
Palestinians seek to make the West Bank part of a future state that would
include the Gaza Strip and have East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel seized
those areas in 1967 and moved troops and settlers out of Gaza in 2005.
“This is our land,” Netanyahu said in his speech in Elkana. “We will build
another Elkana and another Elkana and another Elkana. We will not uproot anyone
here.”More than 400,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank, according to Israeli
figures, among a Palestinian population put at about 2.9 million by the
Palestinian Statistics Bureau.
A further 212,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem, according to the
United Nations. Israeli settlements are viewed as illegal under international
law and as major obstacles to peace since they lie on land the Palestinians see
as part of their future state. Annexation on a large-scale could prove to be the
death knell for their statehood ambitions.
Pope Says Got Stuck in Vatican Lift, Freed by Fireman
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 01/2019
Pope Francis said Sunday he was late to his weekly Angelus prayer because he had
been stuck in a Vatican elevator and had to be freed by firemen."I have to
apologize for being late. I was trapped in a lift for 25 minutes, there was a
power outtage but then the firemen came," the smiling 82-year old pontiff said.
The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous
sources published
on September 01/2019
Analysis/Iran, Yemen and Two More Bleeding Fronts Awaiting Trump's Next Tweet
زفي برئيل: ايران واليمن وجبهتين معهما ينتظرون تغريدات ترامب
Zvi Bar'el/Haaretz/August 01/2019
Washington has become the most threatening front for Israel amid reports the
United States is prepared to negotiate with Iran
At G7, Macron says Trump and Rohani may meet 'within weeks'
Iran prepared to work on French nuclear deal proposals, foreign minister says
Netanyahu, don't interfere with Trump's diplomatic moves toward Iran
The nightmare that Israel became trapped in after Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah promised to retaliate for strikes in Lebanon suddenly seems like the
least of the threats the country should fear. The real “threat” is emanating
from the White House, whose owner is singing songs of peace with Iran.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who hasn’t yet managed to complete a single
diplomatic deal, and whose diplomatic moves throughout his term have left a long
trail of wreckage that has shaken U.S. allies and enemies alike, still clings to
his faith that he is the grand master of conducting negotiations. At least four
burning, bleeding fronts in the Middle East are waiting for his next tweet and
the latest whim that will make the global situation more interesting.
And he didn’t disappoint them. Just this week, the U.S. State Department
announced that it expects to sign an agreement with the Taliban that would allow
some 14,000 U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan within 15 to 18 months, thereby
finally extricating America from the quagmire in which it has been stuck for
more than 18 years. The nine rounds of talks that have taken place in the Qatari
capital of Doha may perhaps yield the longed-for end of the adventure President
George W. Bush embarked on when he conquered the country where Osama bin Laden
was based in response to September 11 attacks.
The fact that America is negotiating with a murderous terrorist organization
that has carried out thousands of attacks on U.S. troops and killed tens of
thousands of Afghans no longer matters. Like Israel, Trump, too, learned fairly
quickly that when the country’s interests make it necessary, it’s permissible to
negotiate even with the devil.
It’s too soon to get excited about the progress in the talks with the Taliban.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani still hasn’t given them his blessing, and when it
comes to the Taliban, last-minute obstacles aren’t unusual. But if an agreement
is signed, it will give this lethal organization legitimate status as a partner
in the government, which will enable it to take Afghanistan back to the dark
times that prevailed when the Islamist organization ruled the country.
But Washington no longer cares. Unlike Bush, Trump doesn’t even use the phrase
“spreading democracy” as a pretext for a continued American presence. He doesn’t
believe democracy is suitable for Muslim countries.
Yemen is another regional theater that’s awaiting the start of negotiations
between the Americans and the Houthis. The Wall Street Journal reported this
week that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to open direct talks with the
Houthis and impose a peace agreement on the Saudis. If this actually happens, it
will consolidate a new diplomatic strategy under which, like in Afghanistan,
it’s better to deal with the enemy directly rather than using other states as
intermediaries, whether militarily or diplomatically.
The Houthis are considered Iran's proxies, who are giving Tehran an important
foothold in the southern Arabian Peninsula and on the Red Sea. Over the past
four years of fighting, they have become the symbol of the battle America and
its Arab allies are waging against Iranian influence in the Middle East.
But Yemen’s civil war is primarily an internal struggle between an oppressed
population that has been excluded from the centers of power and generations of
Yemeni governments. The Houthis allied with Iran because it agreed to help them,
but they could just as easily receive help from other countries, if any were to
offer.
It’s not ideology, or even the weak religious connections between Iran and the
Houthis, that led to the civil war. Rather, Saudi Arabia feared that the civic
uprising in Yemen would spread to its territory, and therefore saw suppressing
it as a national security goal – just like it worked to suppress the Arab Spring
revolutions in all the Arab states where they took place.
The Houthis – who held talks with the U.S. administration under President Barack
Obama – could have served America as an auxiliary force in the war against
Al-Qaida and other Islamist terrorist organizations, like the Islamic State. But
because the war was defined as part of the battle against Iran, America had no
choice but to join forces with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to
suppress the Houthis.
But then it became clear that the best Saudi and UAE troops were insufficient to
achieve a victory. The UAE’s withdrawal from the field of battle and the renewed
ties it has developed with Iran, alongside the political battle in Washington
between Congress and the president, led to the conclusion that in Yemen, too, it
was better to take the diplomatic route, and perhaps this could ultimately
deprive Iran of its foothold in Yemen.
Khaled bin Salman, the younger brother of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
visited Washington this week to find out what the administration is planning.
Prince Khaled was received with all due respect, but Washington's attitude
toward Saudi Arabia has changed dramatically since the murder of journalist
Jamal Khashoggi, to the point that the crown prince himself has become persona
non grata in the American capital.
A quick resolution of the war in Yemen is politically essential for both Trump
and Salman, since the future of the American-Saudi alliance hangs in the
balance.
The Iranian conditions
However, the Afghan and Yemeni fronts pale in comparison to Trump’s about-face
in his position regarding Iran. There are several signs that Trump and Iran are
beginning to plot a diplomatic path.
Trump has publicly declared that he was prepared to negotiate with Iranian
President Hassan Rohani, and Iran responded that it is always ready to hold
talks; Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif made a surprise visit to the G-7
summit in Biarritz, France, which French President Emanuel Macron said was
planned with Trump’s knowledge; and Zarif is planning to visit Russia and France
next week. Trump’s statement on the sidelines of the Biarritz summit that he
hoped to reach a deal with Iran that would extend past 2025 – when the current
nuclear accord is due to expire – and entail freezing or canceling its ballistic
missile program and an Iranian commitment not to develop nuclear arms was
particularly important. And so, only three conditions remain of the 12 that
Pompeo laid down as a basis for removing sanctions, and even those are subject
to negotiation.
Iran still is in no hurry to agree to the French-American initiative, but this
diplomatic discourse turned the Iranian-American dialogue into a discussion
about conditions that would be presented during negotiations even before the
negotiations were held. Iran attained not only the status of a legitimate state
whose leadership one can and should negotiate with, but also forced Trump to
shrink his list of demands, and became the one to present Trump with its
conditions.
Analyses published in Iranian media indicate that Tehran believes the United
States and European signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal had no option left but
to negotiate. The sanctions that the United States levied on Tehran has riven
deep fissures in the transatlantic relationship and failed to stir a civilian
revolution in Iran that would threaten the regime. The military option was taken
off the table, at least according to statements by the United States and Saudi
Arabia that stressed its opposition to war and its position that attacks in Iraq
and Syria attributed to Israel do not pose an existential threat to it.
While there is a fundamental argument in Iran over the feasibility of
negotiations with the United States, this time it involves the tactic of
negotiating, as opposed to other issues that bothered decision-makers on the eve
the nuclear deal was signed.
Iran is publicly demanding the full repeal of sanctions as a condition for any
negotiations. But the dispute within Iran revolves around the conditions Iran
would have to set if a full repeal of sanctions doesn’t happen without a quid
pro quo from Tehran. Iran says it plans to announce another round of cuts to its
commitments to the nuclear deal on September 7, without giving details. Analysts
believe that unless a diplomatic solution is found, Iran will enrich uranium to
a significantly higher level and increase its stockpile of enriched uranium.
However, the pressure that this timetable imposes goes both ways. Just as
European countries and the United States don’t want to reach a point of no
return in which Iran will be declared as completely violating the nuclear deal,
Iran also doesn’t want to reach that point because it would lose its leverage
and leeway.
The options available to both sides are few. Aside from the possibility that
both sides will adhere to their positions, Trump could decide to give a partial
exemption to a small number of countries for a limited time, as well as announce
that the United States will abide by the principles of the nuclear deal without
being a partner to it. Iran could view such gestures as sufficient steps to
begin negotiations, as long as the talks aren’t deemed as a new nuclear
agreement. Iran has already agreed to a more stringent supervisory regime than
what the nuclear deal requires, but the United States doesn’t consider this
offer as sufficient for starting negotiations.
The United States would have to take into consideration Saudi Arabia's and
Israel's interests in all its future negotiations with Iran. This fragile
balance entails an important role for Yemen's Houthis, who worry the Saudis, and
for Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens Israel. It is nearly mission
impossible to defuse all these tripwires in one session of negotiations. It
bears the enormous weight of maintaining the prestige of all sides, displaying
an exceptional diplomatic marketing ability, avoiding volatile political land
mines on every front, achieving security agreements, and attaining guarantees in
an atmosphere that lacks any trust. Paradoxically, an unpredictable leader like
Trump, whose diplomatic rationality isn’t exactly his strong point, who by mere
words turned the dictator of North Korea into a friend and doesn’t understand
why he’s not supposed to mock European leaders, could give us the essence of
Trumpism and untangle the web he has weaved.
Africa’s Sahel Region Urgently Needs the World’s Help
Noah Smith/Bloomberg/September 01/2019
Strong and sustained global growth has enabled living standards throughout most
of the world to converge on an upward course. Even throughout Africa, the
world’s poorest continent, there have been drastic improvements in health,
education and governance. Countries such as Ethiopia and Tanzania are seeing the
start of industrialization.
Yet a few parts of the world remain mired in desperate poverty. The largest and
most troubled of these is the Sahel region of Africa — the long strip of arid
land along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Its outline is hard to
define, and doesn’t overlap well with existing national boundaries, but
generally the Sahel includes Mali, Niger, Chad, South Sudan, Burkina Faso and
the northern half of Nigeria, as well as smaller pieces of several other
countries.
These are not quite the world’s poorest countries — that distinction probably
belongs to a few war-torn nations in central Africa — but they are close. And in
terms of human development, the Sahel lags behind essentially everywhere else.
Its child mortality rates are higher even than those of Ghana and other nearby
countries.
When the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative combined various
measures of health, education and living standards to create an index of
multidimensional poverty, the Sahel stood out starkly.
Why is the Sahel doing so badly? The region is landlocked, which means it has
little sea-based trade. And except for South Sudan, which has significant oil
deposits, Sahel countries have relatively few natural resources. Most people
have to subsist on farming or herding.
But farming and herding are being threatened by desertification. Poverty has led
the people of the Sahel to cut down their forests, overgraze their animals and
over-cultivate their land — making already marginal areas unfit for habitation
as the vast Sahara creeps south. Climate change, bringing ever more frequent
droughts, only makes things worse.
Meanwhile, the Sahel’s population is soaring. Even as fertility has fallen
elsewhere in Africa, most women in the Sahel are still having more than five
children each, expanding the population exponentially. By 2100, Nigeria is
projected to have 733 million people — the third most in the world. Most of that
growth will occur in the country’s Sahelian north, where fertility rates are
highest. With every passing minute, the number of Nigerians in extreme poverty
rises by six.
The exploding population stands to make the Sahel’s plight global, if waves of
destitute migrants and refugees swamp neighboring African countries and threaten
their hard-won economic development. Many may also try moving to Europe, testing
developed countries’ immigration systems. Such an outflow will be exacerbated by
conflicts over scarce resources. South Sudan and Mali already have civil wars,
and the struggle against the extremist Boko Haram group in Nigeria, Niger and
Chad has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
The only real hope is for the US and other rich countries, as well as
international development agencies such as the United Nations and World Bank, to
step in. Foreign aid to Sahel countries is already substantial — but money paid
to governments doesn’t efficiently address the region’s basic problems. Instead,
donors should target education, health and the environment. More schools,
especially for girls, will improve literacy, boost economic growth and enable
family planning. More health clinics will reduce infant mortality. And
reforestation and improved land use will help slow the desert’s advance.
As a major front in the fight against global poverty, the Sahel needs more
attention and aid, or the consequences could be dire.
A Plan for Peace
By Benjamin Netanyahu/The Tablet site/August 01/2019
بنيامين نينتياهو: خطة للسلام
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/78081/benjamin-netanyahu-a-plan-for-peace-%d8%a8%d9%86%d9%8a%d9%85%d9%8a%d9%86-%d9%86%d9%8a%d9%86%d8%aa%d9%8a%d8%a7%d9%87%d9%88-%d8%ae%d8%b7%d8%a9-%d9%84%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%85/
Is America about to adopt the Israeli prime minister’s 20-year-old plan for a
durable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians?
Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the
future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility for
a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has
now been compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if
only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies, the convoluted and
tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have
settled themselves.
While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power
and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is not false
modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab
neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of
achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the attainment of peace
treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will
remain threatened by the destabilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and
Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic missiles and
atomic weapons. Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to
achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must
be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has
been the first casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built
upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and
whittled away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real
peace must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic
antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the
Arab world and the Jewish state.
Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so
many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s existence. The
territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct
with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is
hampered by the continuing concern that once territories are handed over to the
Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state.
Many in the Arab world have still not had an irreversible change of heart when
it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently weak the
conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the
ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs might trigger this destructive
process by convincing the Arab world that Israel has become vulnerable enough to
attack.
That Israel’s existence was a bigger issue than the location of its borders was
brought home to me in the first peace negotiations that I attended as a delegate
to the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. In Madrid, the head of the
Palestinian delegation delivered a flowery speech calling for the cession of
major Israeli population centers to a new Palestinian state and the swamping of
the rest of Israel with Arab refugees, while the Syrian foreign minister
questioned whether the Jews, not being a nation, had a right to a state of their
own in the first place. (And this at a peace conference!) Grievances over
disputed lands and disputed waters, on which the conference sponsors hoped the
participants would eventually focus their attention, receded into insignificance
in the face of such a primal hostility toward Israel’s existence. This part of
the conference served to underscore the words of Syria’s defense minister,
Mustafa Tlas, who with customary bluntness had summed up the issue one year
earlier: “The conflict between the Arab nation and Zionism is over existence,
not borders.”
This remains the essential problem nearly a decade later. The fact that the
Syrians place such immense obstacles before the resumption of peace talks with
us, and the fact that the Palestinians resisted for more than a year my call to
enter fast-track negotiations for a final settlement, underscores their
reluctance to make a genuine and lasting peace with us. To receive territory is
not to make peace. Peace requires that you also give something in return, namely
arrangements not to use the land that is handed over to you as a future staging
area for attacks against Israel. Equally, peace requires that our Arab partners
educate their people to an era of mutual acceptance, something we have failed to
see in many parts of the Arab world.
To begin resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, one must begin here. The Arabs
must be asked forthrightly and unconditionally to make their peace with Israel’s
existence. The Arab regimes must move not only to a state of nonbelligerency but
to a complete renunciation of the desire to destroy the Jewish state—a
renunciation that will gain credibility only when they establish a formal peace
with Israel. This means ending the economic boycott and the explosive arms
buildup, and signing peace treaties with Israel. The Arab states must resign
themselves to something they have opposed for so long: not merely the fact but
the right of Israel’s permanent presence among them. This necessarily means that
they will have to accept mutual coexistence as the operating principle in their
relations with the Jewish state.
A policy of coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union was of
course promulgated in the heyday of the Cold War, and we have become so used to
hearing the phrase that we are inured to its profound importance. For even at a
time when the Communists were possessed by doctrines of global domination, they
were saying that they understood that there was a higher interest, higher even
than the Marxist cause: the survival of their own society and of the planet as a
whole.
This is a rational attitude since it allows warring societies to live, evolve,
and eventually resolve the antagonisms between them. The crucial idea of mutual
coexistence is setting limits to conflict. Yet for close to a century Arab
society and Arab politics have been commandeered by an anti-Jewish obsession
that has known no limits: It harnessed the Nazis, promoted the Final Solution,
launched five wars against Israel, embarked on a campaign of global terrorism,
strangled the world’s economy with oil blackmail, and now, in Iraq and
elsewhere, is attempting to build nuclear bombs for the great Armageddon. This
obsession must be stopped not only for Israel’s sake but for the sake of the
Arabs themselves and for the sake of the world.
It will not do to obscure the primacy of this existential opposition to Israel
as the driving force of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Such obfuscation is
fashionable in current commentaries on Israel and Arabs, in the form of a neat
symmetry imposed on their respective needs and desires. These commentaries hold
that Israel’s demand for Arab recognition of its right to exist should be met in
exchange for various Arab demands, especially for land. Yet to treat these
demands as symmetrical, as the two sides of an equation, is to ignore both
history and causality. Worse, it sets a price tag on the lives of millions of
Jews and their nation.
To see this clearly, imagine the situation in reverse. Suppose Israel refused to
recognize Syria’s right to exist and threatened to destroy the entire country
unless Syria were to evacuate a swatch of territory controlled by Syria that
Israel claimed as its own. This would be widely and correctly viewed as lunacy.
Yet the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist unless it caves in
to their territorial demands for lands from which they have attacked Israel is
accorded serious consideration, even respect, in current diplomacy. What is
overlooked is that Israel’s right to exist is no more negotiable than is the
right of Syria or Egypt to exist.
The Arabs often say that the wrong done to the Palestinians is so great that
they cannot come to terms with Israel’s existence until it is set aright. But
this argument, too, is intended only to confound the issue. The Palestinian
Arabs were offered a state by the United Nations in 1947, and they rejected it.
So did the Arab states, which not only unanimously opposed Palestinian statehood
but sent their armies into Palestine to grab whatever they could—for themselves.
Further, when the West Bank and Gaza, which Jordan and Egypt captured in 1948,
were in Arab hands, barely a whisper about Palestinian statehood was ever heard
in either place. Thus, there is no shred of a historical connection linking the
demand for Palestinian statehood to the Arab refusal to recognize Israel.
The issue of the Palestinian Arabs requires a fair and forthright solution that
takes into account their full situation and the question of their civil status,
alongside the cardinal issues of Jewish rights and Israeli security. But one
thing must be said clearly at the outset: The grievances of the Palestinian
Arabs, real or imagined, cannot be a loaded gun held to Israel’s temple. Today,
after five major wars, Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel
and some of the other Arab states are prepared to recognize Israel, but only in
exchange for a Palestinian state bordering Tel Aviv that would obviously
jeopardize Israel’s existence. This prerequisite, which is now demanded in
nearly every corner of the Arab world, shows the distance that the Arabs must
still travel in permanently reconciling themselves to the presence of a Jewish
state in their midst.
This is not surprising if one considers the enormous anti-Israel propaganda that
has been directed at the Arab and Moslem masses, in which 150 million people
have been endlessly told that a tiny country in their midst has no place under
the sun, that it must be “excised like a cancerous tumor” and “thrown into the
dustbin of history,” as I heard my Iranian counterpart at the UN say in 1984.
When this notion is repeated again and again, day in and day out, for half a
century, there is no reason why the Arab masses should alter their hostility
toward Israel. To be sure, the Madrid Conference, despite its disappointments,
also offered some glimmers of hope. Haltingly, awkwardly, Arabs and Israelis
began a direct, face-to-face dialogue that started a process that may lead to
peace. But Teheran had been touched by none of the stirrings toward change.
Instead, it tossed up a resolution, signed by delegates from all over the Moslem
world, including representatives of various PLO factions, calling once again for
the annihilation of Israel. This is a symptom of a political pathology. Its
essence, like that of certain psychological pathologies in the individual, is an
escape from reality and the summoning of violence to act out irrational
impulses. The first requirement of peace is that this fanaticism not be brooked.
It should be condemned and excoriated in most vigorous terms wherever it
appears. (The Islamic conference in Teheran received hardly a murmur of protest
from any of the Western capitals.) It cannot be dismissed as posturing because,
if left unchallenged, it contaminates the views of the pragmatists and realists
among the Arabs and further inflames the passions of the “Arab street” of which
the realists must be continually wary.
While there are many in the West who are prepared to admit the moral necessity
of Arab recognition of Israel, there is also a widespread acceptance of the
Arabs’ utterly utilitarian rejoinder: What’s in it for us? If not territorial
concessions from Israel, then what do the Arabs get out of peace? Setting aside
momentarily the issue of disputed territory (I will soon return to it), the
Arabs have plenty to gain from the state of peace in and of itself.
First, they can avoid the escalating costs of war. As the Gulf War showed, war
is becoming extremely expensive and exceedingly destructive. With the advance of
military technology, precision bombing, laser-guided missiles, and the sheer
firepower packed in today’s artillery and tanks, an Arab leader bent on war
could find his army destroyed, his capital in ruins, his regime threatened, and
if he is not lucky, his own life in jeopardy. Saddam, after all, was very lucky.
What could he have possibly put up against Norman Schwarzkopf’s divisions if the
American general had received the order to march on to Basra and Baghdad? At
best he himself could have sought a hiding place in Iraq or escaped the country
altogether, as Mengistu of Ethiopia did when his military collapsed (although
given the skills in assassination of several of Saddam’s Arab adversaries, it is
not clear that he would have survived very long in hiding or exile).
But war today carries not only military and personal risks, it invites
unparalleled economic desolation. The bombs may be smarter, but they are also
more destructive. According to a UN report, the obliteration of Iraq’s
infrastructure of roads, bridges, railway lines, power plants, oil refineries,
and industrial enterprises meant that “food … cannot be distributed; water
cannot be purified; sewage cannot be pumped away and cleansed; crops cannot be
irrigated; medicines cannot be conveyed where they are required.” In short, the
report concluded, Iraq had been “relegated to the pre-industrial age.” This may
have been an exaggerated assessment, but it is nevertheless sobering to realize
that this was a level of damage inflicted by an adversary that was discriminate
in its use of force. Iraq—which was, to say the least, less discriminate in
using force—exacted an economic toll from Kuwait estimated to be as high as $30
billion. The pursuit of modern warfare therefore entails the triple risk of
military, political, and economic devastation on a scale that is constantly
escalating. Surely after the Gulf War the Arab leaders must ask themselves
whether Israel would again sit back in the case of armed attack. And just as
surely they must know that the answer is no. Further, if Israel were to face a
threat to its existence, it would respond with awesome power—something that no
sane person, Arab or Jew, could possibly desire. As the cost of war rises, the
benefits of avoiding war and establishing peace rise accordingly. Not only does
peace allow a country to avoid devastation, it enables it to build on its
existing economic foundation rather than devote several years and untold
resources to rebuilding ruins. And it allows it to cooperate with its neighbors
for mutual betterment.
Herein lie the greatest benefits of peace: the tremendous possibilities inherent
in mutual cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. While this fact was always
clear to Israel, it has yet to penetrate the thinking of most Arab leaders, to
the obvious detriment of their societies. For the Arab world stands to gain as
much from making peace with Israel as Israel stands to gain from making peace
with the Arabs.
What would peace be like if the entire Arab world truly believed in it? There is
no area of life that would not be affected. Take trade, as an obvious first
example. Since the Six Day War, Israel’s “open bridges” policy created a
flourishing trade between Israel and Jordan across the Allenby Bridge over the
Jordan River. The signing of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel
significantly expanded this trade. Such trade could be further expanded and its
scope with Jordan and with other Arab countries substantially broadened.
Equally, the Arab world could have access to Israel’s ports on the Mediterranean
and to technology and to other advances in the Israeli marketplace.
Water, too, looms large as a potential benefit of peace. This second precious
liquid (the other is oil) will be the focus of much contention in the coming
years. Agreements on water will be harder to achieve in an increasingly parched
Middle East, whose growing populations will put mounting demands on a limited
water supply. It is thus in everyone’s interest to negotiate water agreements
early on. The first to enjoy the benefits of peace in this regard has been
Jordan. With only 150 cubic meters of water per capita per year (as compared to
Syria’s 2,000 cubic meters), Jordan is an exceedingly dry country.
Israeli-Jordanian cooperation has increased the available water supply for
Jordan, and enhanced cooperation could expand available water for both
countries. This is especially true in the Arava region, the long valley
connecting the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The Arava is neatly divided down the
middle between Israel and Jordan, and both countries draw waters from the wells
dug into its sandy soil that exceed the capacity of the aquifer to replenish
itself. This is leading to increasing salinization, endangering the future water
supply. A coordinated policy could greatly ameliorate the situation. Israeli and
Jordanian scientists could study the problem and devise a joint water policy for
mutual benefit; after all, the subterranean water table does not recognize
national boundaries. Equally, peace could enable Israel and Jordan to cooperate
in the construction of a single desalinization plant of appropriate scale on the
Red Sea, a project that could prove far more economically sensible than
separate, smaller Israeli and Jordanian facilities. Such an effort could be
joined by another water-starved neighbor bordering on the Red Sea—Saudi Arabia.
Syria, while on the face of it much more plentiful in water, nevertheless feels
pressed by Turkey’s plans to dam the Euphrates, which provides a sizable amount
of Syria’s water. This in turn has led to increased tensions among Syria,
Jordan, and Israel over the existing division of the waters of the Yarmuk
tributary to the Jordan River, which is bordered by all three countries. Peace
agreements would of course require review of the Yarmuk arrangements originally
negotiated by President Eisenhower’s emissary, Eric Johnston, in 1955; but they
could also assist Syria in using its other available water much more
efficiently. Israel has devised methods such as drip irrigation to ensure that
85 percent of its irrigation water actually reaches the crops (15 percent is
lost to evaporation and runoff). In Syria the efficiency is less than 40
percent. With the establishment of peace, Israel could teach Syrian farmers the
techniques for more efficient water usage, just as it taught Arab farmers in
Judea and Samaria to increase their irrigation efficiency from 40 percent to
today’s 80 percent. And Israeli engineers could also help Syria build the
national projects it now lacks to carry water to arid sections of the country,
just as Israel did in building its National Water Carrier.
Among the other regional benefits of peace would be unfettered tourism and even
broader access of Israel’s medical facilities to the Arab states. This is one of
the best-known yet least discussed secrets in the Arab world. On any given day
you can find in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem members of the Saudi royal
family, Jordanian jet-setters, and patients from virtually all the rest of the
Arab world who come for both routine and special medical treatment. What are now
incognito sojourns for selected patients could become, especially if accompanied
by training programs for doctors from the Arab countries, an open service that
could substantially improve health care throughout the region. The Israeli
presence on the West Bank has resulted in a significant improvement in this
regard, dramatically reducing infant mortality and improving other health
indicators. Peace could bring overall effects like this to many Arab countries,
literally improving millions of lives.
This discussion of the benefits of peace remains largely theoretical because it
assumes a genuine transformation of Arab attitudes toward Israel. But such a
transformation is so difficult to achieve that even the establishment of a
formal peace with Egypt has not produced it. Egypt continues to keep Israel at
arm’s length, maintaining a “cold peace” consisting of a low-profile and
extremely circumscribed relationship that has prevented the realization of the
full gamut of possibilities for both countries. If peace with Israel could bring
such enormous benefits to the Arab states, why has virtually no Arab leader
stepped forward to explain these benefits to his people and obtain it for them?
Could 150 million people be blind, almost to a person, to something so obvious?
The answer is that they are not. In every Arab society there are those for whom
no explanation is needed concerning the urgent need to end the state of war,
recognize Israel, and get on with the joint task of bringing the Middle East
into the twentieth century before the twentieth century is out. But two
obstacles stand in the way of such realism. First, while the benefits of peace
are understood by isolated individuals, such a perspective is uncommon. Many
Arab leaders who profess a desire for “peace” think of it as a means to an end,
such as regaining lost territory or securing military supplies from the West,
rather than as an end in itself. (Such payoffs to Arab governments should not be
confused with the permanent benefits that real peace would bring to every
citizen.) For much of the Arab world, peace is a coin with which one pays in
order to get something else. As such, it is expendable at a given moment and
under the right circumstances, and it need not last very long. Peace can be
signed one day and discarded the next, once the immediate payoff has been
pocketed—much to the astonishment of Westerners, including Israelis, who have a
completely different understanding of what it means to “make peace.” (For
Israelis, peace is the goal and everything else is a means to it.) Those few
Arabs whose view of peace is more Western find themselves fighting against the
tide in Arab countries that have never known this Western concept of peace from
the day they gained independence, and which are much more familiar with the kind
of peace occasionally offered by Arafat to Israel, the “peace of Saladin,” which
is merely a tactical intermission in a continuing total war.
A second obstacle facing the realists is that no Arab leader or representative
wants to end up like Abdullah of Jordan, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, or Bashir Gemayel
of Lebanon—or for that matter like the many thousands of moderate Palestinian
Arabs whom the Mufti and the PLO have butchered over this century for
“betraying” the Arab cause by trying to make peace with the Jews. For seventy
years, ever since the heyday of the Mufti, every move and every gesture toward
peace has been stifled by fear of the radical Pan-Arab nationalists and Moslem
fundamentalists.
Those who are interested in something more than a pyrrhic peace in the Middle
East must recognize the harsh reality that there is always a powerful Muftist
faction among the Arabs ready to veto peace. The Mufti’s politics of terror is
no less with us today. So long as this branch of Arab politics is powerful
enough to terrorize other Arabs into playing by its rules, making peace will be
an extraordinarily difficult business. When the radicals feel confident and
powerful, the intimidated moderates run to snuggle within the tiger claws of the
dictators, much as King Hussein of Jordan snuggled in Saddam’s paws on the very
eve of the Gulf War. Without suppressing the power of intimidation of the
radicals, there can be no hope that moderates will emerge.
This principle was much in evidence in the case of Morocco. When Qaddafi was at
the height of his power, having conquered most of Chad and terrorized much of
the West with his threats, King Hassan of Morocco—as antithetical a figure to
Qaddafi as one could conjure up in the Arab world—entered into a bizarre
“marriage” between Libya and Morocco. Yet within months of the American bombing
of Tripoli and the collapse of Qaddafi’s forces in Chad, Hassan dissolved the
union and invited Israel’s foreign minister to an open meeting in Morocco.
Similarly, when Syria came to realize in the wake of the Gulf War that the
eclipse of its Soviet benefactor spelled a decline in its ability to resist
American pressure, it suddenly permitted King Hussein and other Arabs to enter
negotiations and even went so far as to sit at the same table with Israel
itself. Pressing the radicals, curtailing their options to intimidate, and
limiting their political and military clout are continual prerequisites for
engaging in any realistic efforts for peace. Any Israeli diplomat who has ever
dealt with the Arabs can recount endless variations on this theme. My own
experience with Arab diplomats has taught me how readily some of them would make
peace if they were freed from the yoke of terror. When I was deputy chief of the
Israeli mission in Washington, I used to meet regularly with one such diplomat,
an ambassador from an Arab country with which Israel has no relations. On one
occasion we had set a meeting in a small restaurant. I arrived five minutes late
and asked the waiter whether a gentleman answering the description of my Arab
colleague had been there.
“Yes,” said the waiter. “He showed up, ordered something to drink, and left
suddenly.”
I called him up. ‘‘Ali, what happened?” I asked.
“I came to the restaurant at the time we’d agreed on. I sat down. Who do you
think I saw at the next table? The Syrian ambassador. I walked out.”
It is a sad commentary on the pace of political evolution in the Arab world that
many years after this conversation took place, I am still unable to reveal the
diplomat’s real name and have had to substitute a false one to protect his
identity.
This little vignette, set in a quiet corner of Washington, D.C., contains in
microcosm the story of countless foiled peace attempts throughout the history of
the Arab-Israeli conflict. The nonradicals might entertain the possibility of
negotiating peace with Israel, but they fear the violent response of the
radicals. This was painfully evident in the Madrid Peace Conference and in the
subsequent talks in Washington. Once again, my Israeli colleagues and I found
that even the most reasonable among the Jordanians and Lebanese were constantly
forced to weigh every word for fear of the PLO and the Syrians, whose
threatening gaze they felt even in the most private of conversations.
The West often aggravates this situation by strengthening the hands of the worst
radicals. It is often so grateful for any reasonable gesture coming from these
quarters that it proceeds to enter into economic and military agreements with
them. It operates on the belief that such carrots will lure a radical regime to
become a less radical one—a view whose full wisdom was revealed in the Western
arming of Saddam in the 1980s. The fact is that the radicals should not be
armed. There should be a curb on weapons sales to the moderates as well, for the
simple reason that in the Middle East today’s “moderate” could be tomorrow’s
radical, courtesy of a coup, an invasion, or mere intimidation.
So long as freedom of expression, the rule of law, and real representative
government are absent from the Arab world, it will continue to be next to
impossible for realist Arabs to have an enduring influence on Arab policies
toward Israel. For this reason, there is a direct relationship between what the
West does to press the Arab world to democratize and the chances of attaining a
durable Middle East peace. In the cases of Germany and Japan, of Russia and the
Ukraine, of Latin America and several African dictatorships, the powerful
relationship between democratic values and the desire for peace has been obvious
to American policymakers, who for years have tied American trade and other forms
of assistance to domestic policy reforms and democratization. For example, the
United States imposed sanctions on China after the massacre in Tiananmen Square
that suppressed the movement for democratization in that country. Similarly,
when the president of Peru suspended democratic institutions in 1992, the United
States undertook a full-court press, including economic sanctions, in order to
prevent backsliding to authoritarian rule in a Latin America it had tirelessly
worked for decades to push into democracy.
Only the Arab states have been entirely exempt from such pressure—much to the
dismay of a handful of reformist Arabs in exile in London who have seen their
fellow Arabs abandoned to the unrelenting totalitarians of Syria, Iraq, and
Libya, and to the unreconstructed dictatorships that form much of the rest of
the Arab world; and much to the dismay of Israel, which must consider the
possibility that these regimes will at any moment return to savaging the Jewish
state alongside the treatment they mete out to their own people.
It might be argued that the West has been slowly inching toward broaching the
subject of democracy with the Arab leaders. But in the wake of the Gulf War,
which the United States waged to save a helpless Saudi Arabia from Saddam and to
resurrect a Kuwait that he had conquered, it is clear that this is not the case.
Never has a ruler been as helpless as was the exiled Emir Al-Sabah of Kuwait,
sitting in Riyadh waiting to have the West extricate his country from Iraq’s
gullet. If ever there had been a moment to extract a commitment to basic human
rights, or a constitution, or a free press, this was it. None was asked for.
Other than the fact that the Arab world possesses a good part of the world’s oil
supply, the West seems to have granted the democratic exemption to the Arab
world for reasons virtually indistinguishable from those the British Colonial
Office held at the end of World War I: a kind of smug condescension that the
Arabs are “not ready” for democracy, that democracy is somehow incompatible with
their Islamic heritage, that “their own traditional forms of government” should
be considered “right for them,” and so on as though, for example, torture,
amputation, slavery, a manacled press, and absolute rule by a family of a few
hundred cousins is anything but a tyranny by any standard. Most bizarre are the
attempts by Westerners to convince themselves that the Arabs should have their
democratic exemption because what they already have is as good as democracy, as
in the periodic journalistic accounts of Saudi Arabia as a quiet, gentle
kingdom—a kind of Tibet in the sands.
Arab culture and Islamic civilization are no better excuses for an exemption
from democracy than were Japanese culture in 1945 and Russian civilization in
1989—although neither of these had been democratic societies before. For an
enduring peace to be built in the Middle East, America must stop coddling the
various Arab dictators and autocrats and begin pushing them to adopt the most
rudimentary guarantees that will allow those willing to live peacefully with
Israel to come out of the closet, publish their opinions, organize political
parties, and ultimately be elected to positions to make good on their beliefs.
Some argue that democracy cannot be introduced into the Arab states because it
will bring the Islamic fundamentalists to power. But of course the idea cannot
simply be to establish majority rule, and thereby hand power to the tyranny of
the mob. To advance democracy in the Arab world, the West must promote the
concepts of individual rights and constitutional limits on governmental power,
without which the existence of any genuine democracy is impossible. Without real
and concerted steps in this direction, the perennial search for Arabs willing to
make a permanent (as opposed to a tactical) peace with Israel will be ultimately
futile.
I wrote the above before I was elected Prime Minister, and my views have
substantially remained unaltered. But I have come to recognize that neither the
United States nor the Western countries are likely to act toward the goal of
democratization in the Arab world. Nor is it possible for Israel to do so, for
any action on our part would be falsely interpreted as an attempt to destabilize
neighboring regimes, changing one ruler with another—something we have
absolutely no desire to do. Consequently, we must assume that for our generation
and perhaps the next, the task of peacemaking is with the Arab world as it is,
unreformed and undemocratic. The prevalence of radicalism in the Middle East—and
the danger that, in the absence of any democratic traditions, a nonradical
regime can turn radical overnight—means that peace in the Middle East must have
security arrangements built into it. I have already noted that for the
foreseeable future the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between
Arab and Arab and between Arab and Jew is the peace of deterrence. Security is
an indispensable pillar of peace for any resolution of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the
possibility of a future war. An Israel lacking security would eventually invite
an act of aggression that would destroy the peace. The question we must
therefore ask is, what are Israel’s minimal security requirements that can
sustain its defenses and thereby sustain the peace?
This question need not be answered in territorial terms alone. The adoption of
security arrangements between Israel and the Arab states, such as a hotline
between Damascus and Jerusalem, or procedures to alert the other side to planned
military maneuvers, can reduce the possibility of war. Buffer zones might be
created to prevent the stockpiling of weapons next to particularly sensitive
borders. Such zones would be free of heavy military equipment such as tanks and
artillery and could be accessible to the officers of the other side. Of
necessity, the configuration of these zones would have to take into account the
tremendous disparity in the dimensions of Israel as compared with those of its
Arab neighbors.
But however useful such devices may be, they cannot meet a contingency in which
Israel’s enemies decide to violate the rules and invade. In the case of Israel,
as we have seen, military distances are so tiny and warning times so short that
without minimal strategic depth to absorb an attack and mobilize its reserves,
Israel’s existence would be placed in jeopardy. Nor can its need for strategic
depth be filled by international guarantees. Even if the guaranteeing powers
summon the will to act—which, despite a formal promise, the friendly American
administration did not do on the eve of the Six Day War—there looms the question
of whether they could physically dispatch the forces in time. Kuwait, a country
almost exactly the size of Israel (minus the West Bank), was overrun in a matter
of six hours, but liberated only after a six-month buildup of huge forces
shipped from West to East. Israel cannot be asked to play the role of Lazarus.
It will not rise from the dead, to whose ranks its defeat would surely consign
it. For unlike Arab Kuwait, no one doubts that if the Jewish state were ever
conquered by Arab armies, it would be effectively, irredeemably destroyed. The
problem with international guarantees for Israel is therefore exactly what Golda
Meir said it was: “By the time they come to save Israel, there won’t be an
Israel.”
Israel’s defenses therefore must be entrusted to its own forces, which are
willing and able to act in real time against an imminent invasion or attack.
When seeking, as we must, a peace based on security, we must necessarily ask
what secure boundaries for Israel would be. Clearly, the Six Day War boundaries
are the boundaries not of peace but of war. But how much broader does Israel
need to be? As we have seen, the crucial question is not only additional
increments of strategic depth but the incorporation of the Judea-Samaria
mountain ridge, which forms a protective wall against invasion from the east. It
is not feasible for Israel to relinquish military control of this wall. A
similar situation prevails for the Golan Heights, which dominate the north. When
these territories were in Arab hands, the result was war, not peace. One simply
cannot talk about peace and security for Israel and in the same breath expect
Israel to significantly alter its existing defense boundaries.
Arab leaders’ promises that the Palestinian Arabs would have the whole of
Palestine in 1947, the whole of Israel in 1967, and the whole of Jordan in 1970
all proved to be impediments to resolving the problem of the Palestinian Arabs,
each one leading to the rejection of rational compromises and to further
calamity.
Jerusalem, too, has been the subject of renewed Arab demands. Arafat has long
and often said that there will be no peace so long as the PLO flag does not fly
over the city. The West has often taken this statement at face value, and every
peace plan to date that Westerners have offered has been in some fashion
gerrymandered to allow an Arab flag to fly over some section of
Jerusalem—usually over what the media like to refer to as “’fuab East
Jerusalem.” Of course, there is nothing exclusively or even mainly “’fuab” about
eastern Jerusalem. This part of the city consists of those portions of Jerusalem
that the Jordanian Legion was able to tear away by force in 1948. Many Jews
lived there at the time, but the Jordanians expelled them. Today these sections
of the city have 150,000 Jewish residents and a similar number of Arab
residents. (Unlike the Jordanians, who expelled the Jews when they conquered
this portion of the city in 1948, Israel left the Arab population intact and
offered it Israeli citizenship.)
Eastern Jerusalem includes the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the City of
David. It was the capital of ancient Israel for twelve centuries, the very heart
and soul of all Jewish aspiration to return and rebuild the Land of Israel.
Israel could not under any circumstances negotiate over any aspect of Jerusalem,
any more than Americans would negotiate over Washington, Englishmen over London,
or Frenchmen over Paris. Israel is prepared to offer the Arabs full and equal
rights in Jerusalem—but no rights over Jerusalem.
The tremendous significance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people—as well as the
indelible physical facts of Jewish neighborhoods such as Gilo, Ramot, Ramat
Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Neve Ya’akov built in eastern Jerusalem
since 1967—make the notion that somehow Jerusalem will be redivided sheer
fantasy. Yet it is not only Arabs who cling to this fantasy. In practically
every foreign ministry in the West, including the U.S. State Department, there
are maps that do not include East Jerusalem as part of a united Jerusalem under
Israeli sovereignty. Indeed, most governments refuse to recognize even West
Jerusalem as part of Israel, on the grounds that “the final status of Jerusalem
remains to be negotiated, “in the hope that it will be internationalized—this in
recognition of its “special status,” reflecting its unique importance not only
to Judaism but to Islam and Christianity as well. But it is only under Jewish
rule that Jerusalem has become a city open to all faiths, with the holy sites of
all religions protected equally for the first time in history. The Jewish belief
in the universal meaning of Jerusalem has made it today a truly universal city.
To pry the city away from the one people that has ensured unimpeded access to it
for all, to put it under a UN-type administration, would not merely violate the
historic right of the Jewish people to its one and only capital. It would assure
a descent into factionalism, where shrill partisans of Islam like the followers
of Khomeini and Qaddafi would return the city to the divisions and sectarian
strife that characterized it before 1967—something for which no rational person
could possibly wish. This is why Israel, within the context of a peace agreement
with the Arabs, is prepared to guarantee free access to Moslems wishing to make
pilgrimages to their holy places in Jerusalem, but will in no way alter Israel’s
ability to maintain Jerusalem as a peaceful and open city under Israeli
sovereignty.
It will be objected that in keeping sovereignty over Jerusalem and the remaining
territories, Israel is expecting the Arabs to renounce their claim to what they
consider part of their domain. This is precisely the case. An entire century of
Arab wars has been waged against the Jews because the Arabs have refused to in
any way temper their doctrine of never giving up what they claim to be Arab
lands. In fact, in its entire recorded history, the Arab nation has never given
up a single inch of land willingly, for the sake of peace or for the sake of
anything else. This fact was confirmed to the point of absurdity after the
cession of the entire Sinai (more than twice the size of all of Israel), when
Egypt refused to reciprocate by ceding Israel a few hundred yards on which the
Israelis had partially built a luxury hotel—leading to a crisis of several years
that finally ended when Israel gave up the land in 1989.
But the time has finally come to recognize that peace will be possible only when
both sides are willing to strike a compromise that gives each the minimum it
needs to live. The Zionist movement and the State of Israel are by now well
acquainted with compromising on ideology for the sake of coexistence and peace,
having done so at least four times in this century. In 1919 the Zionists
bitterly gave up on their claim to the Litani River (now in southern Lebanon),
which was to have been the main water source for the new Jewish state. In 1922
four-fifths of the Jewish National Home was made off-limits to Jews so that
there could be a territory, Jordan, reserved for the Arabs of Palestine. This
was much more painful, for it meant giving up on a large portion of biblical
Israel and agreeing that the Jewish state would be only forty miles wide. But
for the sake of peace, the Jews have given up on this claim as well, and they
asked the Palestinian-Jordanian state four times the size of Israel to give them
nothing in return. In the 1979 treaty with Egypt, Israel compromised many of its
most cherished principles for the sake of peace. In giving up the Sinai, it
conceded vast lands, transferred thousands of Jews from their homes, razed
houses, schools, and farms that had been built from the desert over fifteen
years, and utterly renounced every one of the Jewish historical, strategic, and
economic claims to land where the Jewish people had received the Law of Moses
and become a nation. In 1989, Israel gave Taba, near Eilat, to Egypt for the
sake of peace and once again, in the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel ceded land to the
Palestinians.
For three-quarters of a century the Jews have repeatedly compromised on
substantive strategic, historical, and moral claims in order to placate their
Arab neighbors in the hope of buying peace. It is impossible that peace should
be attained by asking the Jews to compromise on everything and the Arabs to
compromise on nothing. The Arabs, possessing lands over five hundred times
greater in area than Israel’s, must now do a small fraction of what Israel has
done: For the very first time in their long history of expansionism and
intolerance, they must compromise. For the sake of peace, they must renounce
their claims to part of the four ten-thousandths—.0004—of the lands they desire,
which constitutes the very heart of the Jewish homeland and the protective wall
of the Jewish state. If the Arabs are unwilling to make even this microscopic
one-time concession, if they are still so possessed by the fantasy of an
exclusively Arab realm that they cannot bring themselves to compromise on an
inch of land to make the Middle East habitable for the Jewish state, it is hard
to make the case that they are in fact ready for peace.
But what about the other side, the question of the Arabs in the zones of Judea
and Samaria? The fact that Israel is extremely circumscribed in the territorial
compromises it is capable of making necessarily raises the question of the
future of these people. By hanging on to territory, Israel, it is said, might
gain the security inherent in better terrain, but it would encumber itself with
a hostile population.
True enough. But this dilemma has been put behind us by the implementation of
the early stages of the Oslo Accords. Israel transferred to Palestinian control
most of the territory in the Gaza district, which encompasses all the
Palestinian residents of that area. Further, in the West Bank, Israel
transferred to Palestinian control the lands that encompass a full 98 percent of
the Palestinian population (the remaining 2 percent are composed in part of
nomadic Bedouin who move from place to place). Thus the question of Israel’s
retaining a hostile population has become a moot point. As of 1995 the
Palestinian Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank live under Palestinian rule. The
remaining issues to be resolved are not over the human rights of the
Palestinians or their civil enfranchisement. That is an issue that they have yet
to resolve among themselves: Individual rights, freedom of the press, pluralism,
and democracy are matters that the Palestinians have to resolve between
themselves and the Palestinian Authority that rules them. Israel, however
interested an observer, has no part in this debate. The Israelis and the
Palestinians must resolve two pivotal questions:
1) the disposition of the remaining territory of Judea and Samaria; and
2) the political status of the self-governing Palestinian entity and its
relationship to the State of Israel.
Resolving the territorial issue, though an extremely complex matter, has been
made somewhat less difficult because of the fact that the remaining territories
are largely uninhabited by Palestinians (more precisely, they are inhabited by
Jews). This terrain includes, however, areas that are crucial for Israel’s
defense and vital national interests. Accordingly, Israel seeks a final peace
settlement with the Palestinians that would leave it with indispensable security
zones. First and foremost, it requires a land buffer that includes the Jordan
Valley and the hills directly overlooking it and that would extend southward to
the ridges above the Dead Sea. At its deepest point, this buffer will be about
12 miles wide, a minimal depth given the fact that Israel faces a threat from a
potential eastern front, which might include thousands of Iraqi, Syrian, and
Iranian tanks. During the Cold War, NATO’s generals assessed that they would
need 180 miles of strategic depth to ward off a similar threat from the east.
Alas, Israel must live with strategic depth that is less than 10 percent of
that, but it cannot shrink this depth any further. Second, Israel must have a
zone of separation between the Palestinian areas and the crowded coastline where
most of its population lives. This zone, whose widest point is a few miles, is
narrower than the eastern buffer, but is important in any future arrangement for
minimizing terrorist infiltration from the Palestinian areas to Israel’s major
cities. Furthermore, Israel must retain a security cordon around Jerusalem to
ensure that the city is not choked by adjoining Palestinian areas. Israel must
also keep its early warning stations at the heights of the Samarian mountains,
facilities that offer indispensable warning against air and ground attacks from
the east. In addition, Israel must maintain broad corridors of territory to
facilitate movement from the coastline to the Jordan Valley buffer in times of
emergency. Those corridors, not accidentally, include much of the Jewish
population in Judea-Samaria. Israel must protect the Jewish communities and
facilitate the citizens’ ability to live and travel securely. Equally, Israel
must make sure that the main aquifer that supplies some 40 percent of the
country’s water, running at the lower part of the western slopes of the Judean
and Samarian hills, does not come under Palestinian control; it is, after all,
impossible for the country to live with its water siphoned off or contaminated
by the Palestinian Authority. Israel must take into account other special
security requirements, such as controlling the areas abutting the Tel Aviv or
Jerusalem airports to prevent terrorists from firing at civilian aircraft from
these positions. Finally, Israel must keep places sacrosanct to Judaism and the
Jewish people within its domain and guarantee unfettered access to them as was
done in the Hebron agreements, which left the Tomb of the Patriarchs under
Israel’s control.
These are Israel’s minimal requirements to protect the life of the state.
Obviously, full control of the West Bank, including the Palestinian areas, would
have given Israel much greater security in an insecure Middle East. Yet
retaining the minimal elements of defense enumerated above will enable Israel to
transfer to the Palestinians additional areas that are not included in these
categories, thereby expanding the Palestinian domain without significantly
hurting Israel’s security. Equally, Israel is prepared to make special
arrangements facilitating safe passage of Palestinians through its own
territory, thus enabling direct Palestinian travel between Gaza and the West
Bank.
It is largely for these considerations that I negotiated the interim agreement
at the Wye River Plantation in 1998 with President Clinton and Yasser Arafat. My
principal objective at Wye was to limit the extent of further interim Israeli
withdrawals so as to leave Israel with sufficient territorial depth for its
defense. As stipulated under the Oslo agreement, Israel was to withdraw in three
successive “disengagements” from additional territory in Judea-Samaria, which
would be handed over to the Palestinian Authority prior to the negotiations on a
permanent peace agreement, or “final settlement.”
The Palestinian side had already received 27 percent of the territory from the
Labor government. Based on its experience of negotiating with that government,
it expected Israel to cede in these withdrawals the bulk of the territory. As
Arafat’s deputy, Abu Mazen, explained to a senior official in my government upon
the signing of the Hebron agreement in 1997: “What about the 90 percent of the
territory you promised us?” The response was: “We didn’t promise you anything of
the kind.” Whatever officials of the previous Labor government had whispered in
Palestinian ears was irrelevant. What was relevant were the signed contracts we
inherited from Labor, and these did not obligate Israel to such dangerous
withdrawals. Indeed, since the Oslo Accords did not quantify the extent of
redeployment, we proceeded to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, or more
specifically with the United States, on much smaller redeployments. Ultimately
we agreed in Wye that the first two redeployments would amount to 13 percent of
the territory. We also agreed with the U.S. that Israel would officially declare
that the third redeployment, which the U.S. recognized as an Israeli prerogative
not subject to negotiation, would not exceed an additional 1 percent.
Thus, instead of a process in which Israel would retreat to the virtually
indefensible pre-1967 line even before final settlement negotiations were
concluded, I sought and achieved a different result at Wye: that most of the
West Bank would remain in our hands pending the start of these negotiations.
Israel would retain some 60 percent of the territory with all the West Bank’s
Jewish population; the Palestinian Authority would have some 40 percent of the
area with virtually the entire Palestinian population. Naturally, this is a much
improved position for Israel to negotiate from; one that bolsters our defenses
against external attack and the threat of terrorism, while leaving us in an
advantageous position for the final settlement negotiations.
We also achieved a second objective at Wye: We incorporated the principle of
reciprocity into the agreement. Palestinians would get 13 percent of
Judea-Samaria (West Bank) territory in three successive stages only after they
implemented their own commitments undertaken at Wye. No more free lunches.
The first stage in the implementation of Palestinian commitments involved mostly
formalities, such as naming Palestinian delegates to various joint committees
and issuing decrees against incitement and the possession of illegal weapons.
The Palestinians met these obligations, and we promptly discharged ours: We
withdrew from 2 percent of Area C and transferred 7 percent of Area B, hitherto
under joint Israeli-Palestinian security control, to full Palestinian control.
The second stage—which covered the next four weeks—was a different story. At
this point the Palestinians were obligated to repeal the articles in the
Palestinian Charter, which called for Israel’s destruction, and take the first
concrete steps against the terrorist infrastructure. On December 14, they
repealed the charter—a genocidal document without parallel in today’s world—in a
Gaza gathering addressed by President Bill Clinton.
Many claimed that from a strictly legal viewpoint the repeal was invalid.
According to the charter’s own provisions, it can be amended only in a special
session of the Palestinian National Council by a vote of two-thirds of the
membership—conditions that were not met in Gaza. But the purpose of the
exercise—to make the rejection of the charter irreversible—was achieved. After
renouncing the charter in a public display before the world’s cameras and in the
presence of the U.S. president, it would be impossible to claim that it was
still a valid document.
But the Palestinians seemed to feel that rejecting the charter was all they had
to do. And they expected us not only to reward them for disavowing genocide, but
to ignore their failure to discharge their other obligations.
To us, the other commitments undertaken at Wye were at least as pertinent, for
they constituted the first concrete steps to be taken by the Palestinian
Authority against the terrorist organizations. The Palestinian Authority was
supposed to arrest wanted terrorists and have representatives of the U.S. verify
their incarceration; implement the law prohibiting membership in terrorist
organizations; collect illegal weapons held by civilians and hand over such
prohibited weapons as mortars, anti-tank missiles, and land mines held by the
Palestinian Authority police; cease daily incitement to violence; stop
organizing anti-Israeli riots; submit a report on the number of Palestinian
Authority police in excess of the 30,000 permitted by the Oslo agreement; and
maintain “comprehensive, intensive, and continuous” cooperation with Israel on
security matters.
The Palestinian Authority complied with none of these commitments. They did, to
be sure, display a few assault rifles and handguns, presumably confiscated from
civilians, and they detained some wanted terrorists and Hamas political leaders.
But after Arafat himself asserted that there were at least 30,000 illegal
weapons in Gaza alone, the collection of a few illegal guns for the benefit of
network cameras appeared to be little more than a public relations exercise. And
the arrest of Hamas operatives was of little consequence. Some of the most
notorious participants in planning and executing suicide bombings against
Israeli civilians (some of whom were American citizens) were among the scores of
Hamas detainees released by the Palestinian Authority within weeks after their
arrest.
Adhering to the principle of reciprocity, the Israeli government announced that
there would be no further withdrawals until the Palestinian Authority complied
with the agreement. This was the guiding principle of my policy from the day I
formed the government in 1996, and I was not about to abandon it at this crucial
time. Insistence on reciprocity became particularly pertinent after the Wye
conference, because Arafat and other Palestinian leaders took to threatening to
unilaterally declare a state on May 4, 1999, regardless of what happened in the
negotiations. By thus predetermining the result of the Oslo process, they made a
mockery of the negotiations. To hand over territory under such circumstances
would have been an act of national irresponsibility. The Palestinians’ refusal
to combat the terrorist groups ensured that the relinquished land would be used
to facilitate attacks against us and to shelter terrorists. And their threat to
declare a state—which by the very manner of its establishment would be hostile,
dangerous, and unbound by any agreement with us—rendered the forfeiture of
territory on our part nothing short of reckless.
I made it clear that Israeli redeployment could only follow the faithful and
complete implementation of Palestinian obligations, and that conclusive
negotiations over territory would have to await the final status talks.
The negotiations over territory will be the most complex and difficult in
Israel’s history. They will involve balancing Israel’s national interests,
foremost of which is security, with the Palestinians’ wish to increase their own
territorial domain. These negotiations will determine whether Israel will have
the territorial bulwarks necessary to defend itself and safeguard a future
peace. But they are only one of the two crucial issues for permanent peace
negotiations with the Palestinians. The second is the question of the status of
the Palestinian entity. Many in the world have blithely accepted the notion that
the Palestinians must have their own independent state. They have not asked
themselves what powers would accrue to such unbridled Palestinian
self-determination. Could the Palestinian state make military pacts with Iran,
Iraq, or Syria? Could it be allowed to place troops from these countries on the
hills above Tel Aviv? Could it build an army of its own? Could it arm itself
with the most sophisticated weapons, such as ground-to-air missiles that can
shoot down the planes of the Israeli air force, thereby endangering Israel’s
very existence? Could it bring in untold numbers of Arabs, nonrefugees as well
as refugees, under the banner of the “right of return,” position them along the
seamline with Israel, and begin to infiltrate the country? Clearly, a
Palestinian entity with all these powers is a recipe not for peace but for
disaster.
My view of an equitable and secure arrangement for the status of a Palestinian
entity is based on a simple principle: The Palestinians should have all the
powers to run their lives and none of the powers to threaten Israel’s life. This
means that the Palestinian entity can enjoy all the attributes of
self-government, which include its own legislature, executive, judiciary,
passports, flag, education, commerce, tourism, health, police, and every other
power and institution controlling the collective and individual life of
Palestinians within the Palestinian entity. In fact, the Palestinians have by
now received nearly all of these things in the first two stages of the Oslo
Accords. What remains to negotiate are those few powers relating to external
security. In a permanent peace settlement, the Palestinians should have all the
powers to administer Palestinian life; some should be shared with Israel, such
as those relating to the environment (since mosquitoes, for example, do not
recognize territorial divisions), and still a few other powers, primarily those
relating to external security, should be retained by Israel. Thus, the
Palestinian entity should not be able to form military pacts with sovereign
states, or build and arm a standing army, or import weapons without Israel ‘s
consent. Israel must maintain control of the airspace, vital for its very
survival, and the international entry points through which dangerous arms and
terrorists could penetrate into the Palestinian areas and from there into Israel
itself. The issue of the Palestinian refugees must be settled responsibly. The
overwhelming majority should be given full rights and rehabilitation in the
respective Arab countries where they reside. Israel should not be put at risk of
being flooded with refugees sworn to its destruction.
These arrangements would leave the Palestinian entity with considerable powers,
and certainly all the ones necessary for self-government. Yet they are not
compatible with the idea of unlimited self-determination, which is what many
normally associate with the concept of statehood. Statehood has a dynamic of its
own, which implies powers that self-government does not necessarily warrant.
Among other things, it will enable the Palestinian Arabs to join the United
Nations, where they will easily receive the support of most governments and
quickly free themselves of any limitation that they may contractually assume to
obtain our consent. That is why when I am asked whether I will support a
Palestinian state, I answer in the negative. I support the Palestinians’ ability
to control their own destiny but not their ability to extinguish the Jewish
future. As I have indicated earlier in this book, I believe that this functional
solution, giving the Palestinians all the powers necessary for
self-administration and Israel those essential powers necessary to protect its
national life, is a model for the kind of solution that could be replicated in
many similar disputes around the world. It offers the only reasonable
alternative between two unacceptable options: military subjugation on the one
hand, and unbridled self-determination on the other. The first option is morally
unacceptable, the second a prescription for catastrophe. But at the heart of the
solution that I advocate is not only a fair and durable division of territory
and powers but also a reasoned hope that the Palestinians will recognize that no
other solution will be acceptable to the overwhelming majority of Israelis; and
that this realization in turn would foster over time a gradual, if grudging,
reconciliation with the permanence of Israel’s existence and the need to come to
concrete terms with it. It nullifies the hope of using the Palestinian areas as
a base to launch the future destruction of the Jewish state, while offering the
Palestinians a life of dignity, self-respect, and self-government.
But it is not only Israelis and Arabs who have roles to play in bringing a
lasting peace to a region so important to the entire world. As the Camp David
Accords demonstrated, the moral, strategic, and financial assistance of the West
can play a decisive role in making peace possible. An important step was taken
with the commencement of multilateral talks under the auspices of the peace
talks begun in 1991. This international support was later reaffirmed and
expanded under the Oslo Accords. Foreign involvement in areas such as the
development of water resources and protection of the environment would be of
major significance to the region, and it would alleviate some of the sources of
tensions that could easily contribute to renewed hostility and war.
In particular, there are two areas demanding substantial commitments from
Western governments, without which the possibility of achieving peace would be
seriously, and I believe irrevocably, impaired. The first is the resettlement of
the remaining Arab refugees. As we have seen time and again, the various refugee
districts scattered throughout the Middle East are the breeding ground for
misery and hatred. Without them the PLO would have a hard time even existing,
and a major source of instability would have been removed from the region. In
this effort, the continuation of the problem is not a matter of disinterested
morality to the states of the West. They too have a stake in dismantling the
camps as a step toward ending the long campaign of terror that the rulers of the
camps have waged against Israel and the West. Western assistance will be
necessary to undertake the large-scale construction of housing projects and
infrastructure necessary to transform the camps into towns, as well as
educational projects and investments in businesses intended to raise the
standard of living. The Western countries should also offer to absorb those
refugees who prefer a new home in North America or Europe to continuing to live
in Israel or the Arab states. Among them, the Western countries could handily
absorb even the entire refugee population if necessary, settling the matter once
and for all.
It is true that the Arab states possess sufficient funds to easily pay for this
effort themselves, but given their past record of refugee relief (the entire
Arab world contributes less than one percent of UNRWA’s budget·), it will be a
triumph if they can be prodded into assisting at all. Such Arab involvement in
the resettling of refugees should be demanded, both because the Arab states are
responsible for originating and sustaining the refugee problem and because their
participating in resolving it would signify a real commitment to ending the
conflict with Israel.
But the West, including the United States, has so far refused to put its foot
down even on a matter as straightforward as ending the Arab fantasy of one day
implementing the “right of return.” When asked if the United States still
supported UN Resolution 194 from December 1948 (in the middle of the War of
Independence), which called for the return of the refugees, the United States
couldn’t muster the simple word no. It stammered for three days and finally came
up with a circumlocution (“The Resolution is irrelevant to the peace process”)
that leaves the Arabs still with the hope of one day thrusting upon Israel the
burden of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of people whom the Arab regimes
have cruelly maintained as lifelong refugees. On the refugee issue, as with
other outdated or unjust UN resolutions (like the 1947 UN Partition Plan
allotting the Jews only half of the present-day Israel, and the resolution
calling for the internationalization of Jerusalem), the United States and
European nations must alter their formal positions and flatly declare the
resolutions to be null and void.
An essential area for international development is in the field of
nonconventional arms development in the Arab countries. Nearly a decade after
the victorious assault against Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons facilities are
still being found in Iraq, and there are probably plenty more where these came
from. As the request to clean out Iraq has proved, it is exceedingly difficult
to strip a country of the know-how and technology to build weapons of mass
destruction once it has them. The only possible way of forestalling the day when
Arab states will have the capacity to wipe out Israeli cities (and those of
other countries) at the touch of a button is to secure a real, enforced
moratorium on the transfer of such weapons and expertise to Iran and the Arab
world—and this means the imposition of sanctions on countries that are found to
be in violation of the ban. Without such concerted international action and in
the absence of the democratization of Middle Eastern regimes, it will only be a
matter of time before one of the dictatorships in the region acquires nuclear
weapons, imperiling not only Israel and the Middle East but the peace of
everyone else on the planet.
It is possible to present all of these steps as a peace plan comprised of three
tracks: bilateral measures between Israel and Arab states; international
measures taken by the nations of the world (including assistance to joint
projects involving Israel and the Arab states); and measures taken to improve
the conditions under which Jews and Arabs live side by side in peace with each
other. Each of these elements obviously requires careful articulation and much
elaboration, which only painstaking negotiations can produce. Such negotiations
understandably might alter certain components and possibly add others.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that the approach described in this chapter ought
to serve as a blueprint for the achievement of a realistic and enduring peace
between Arabs and Israelis.
In addition to the proposals for a resolution of the question of the disputed
areas, a comprehensive approach to an Arab-Israeli peace must include formal
peace treaties between the Arab states and Israel; security arrangements with
the Arab states to protect Israel from future attacks and to enable all sides to
monitor compliance with the agreements; normalization of relations (including an
end to the Arab economic boycott of Israel); cessation of official anti-Semitic
and anti-Zionist propaganda in Arab schools and government media; an
international regime to ban the sale of nonconventional weapons or materiel to
the radical regimes of the Middle East; internationally assisted refugee housing
and resettlement projects; and regional cooperation for water development and
environmental protection.
This is the path to an Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East as it really
is—turbulent, undemocratized, and as yet unreformed of its underlying
antagonisms. Those antagonisms will be extremely slow to disappear. This is why
a genuine reconciliation, in addition to having buttresses of stability,
security, and cooperation built into it, must contain a strong element of
gradualism. Such a graduated approach would allow both sides to alter their
conceptions about achieving peace, should the basic political and military
conditions of the region undergo a substantial transformation—for the better,
one would hope.
While endless ink has been spilled in calling for various futile resolutions to
the ongoing strife between the Jewish and Arab peoples over the disposition of
Palestine, the proposal made here takes full account of Israel’s security needs,
while granting control over their own needs to the Arabs living in Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza. Though it is certain to arouse furious opposition from
irredentists in the Arab camp, as well as from purists on the Israeli left and
right, I believe that it offers a real hope of a lasting peace—and one in which
any realist in any camp can wholeheartedly believe.
*From the book A Durable Peace: Israel and its Place Among the Nations by
Benjamin Netanyahu. Copyright © 2000 by Benjamin Netanyahu. Reprinted by
permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
*Benjamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister of Israel
European Dreams vs. Mass Migration
Giulio Meotti/Gatestone Institute/September 01/2019
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14767/europe-dreams-immigration
Unfortunately, the European mindset refuses to face the reality, as if the
challenge is too severe to be addressed.
"The conference took place under the theme 'Penser l'Europe' ['Thinking of
Europe']... There, I was disturbed to hear Tariq Ramadan speaking of Europe as
dar al-Shahada, i.e. house of Islamic belief. The attending audience was
alarmed, but did not get the message of the perception of Europe... as a part of
house of Islam. If Europe is no longer perceived as dar al-Harb/house of war,
but viewed as part of the peaceful house of Islam, then this is not a sign of
moderation, as some wrongly assume: it is the mindset of an Islamization of
Europe". — Bassam Tibi, Professor Emeritus of International Relations,
University of Goettingen.
It is a false Marxist notion among young people here in Europe that if you are
successful or comfortable, it can only have been at the expense of humanity: "If
I win, somebody else must lose." There seems to be no concept at all of
"win-win" -- "If I win, all of you can win too: everyone can win!" -- which
underpins the free economy and has lifted so much of the world so spectacularly
out of poverty.
It is important to... reject the current fashion of self-abasement. Europe seems
to be afflicted with a skepticism about the future, as if the decline of the
West is actually a justified punishment and a liberation from its faults of the
past.... "For me, today," notes Alain Finkielkraut, "the most essential thing is
European civilization".
The price for cultural relativism has become painfully visible in Europe. The
disintegration of Western nation-states is now a real possibility.
Multiculturalism -- built on a background of demographic decline, massive
de-Christianization and cultural self-repudiation -- is nothing more than a
transitional phase that risks leading to the fragmentation of the West. (Image
source: iStock)
Europe presents itself as the vanguard of the unification of humanity. Europe's
cultural roots, as a result, have been put at risk. According to Pierre Manent,
a renowned French political scientist and a professor at the School for Advanced
Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris:
"European pride or European self-consciousness depend on the rejection of
European history and European civilization! We want nothing to do with the
Christian roots and we absolutely want to be perfectly welcoming to Islam".
Manent delivered these words to the French monthly, Causeur. He cited, as an
example, Turkey:
"It was very clear that not only was its massively Islamic character (even
before Erdogan) not an obstacle but a sort of motive, a reason to bring the
Turkey into the EU. It would finally have been the definitive proof that Europe
had detached itself and freed itself from its Christian dependence".
Europe's southern border is now the front line for this mass-migration; Italy
risks becoming that refugee camp. In the last few months, Italy has faced a
succession of boats from Africa, challenging its policy: first the Sea Watch 3,
then the Open Arms and finally the Ocean Viking. Until just before Italy's March
2018 elections, migrants were crossing the Mediterranean at the rate of 200,000
a year.
Since European security ministers failed to agree on the Mediterranean refugee
crisis, Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, willing to stand virtually
alone, chose to close Italian ports. Although Italian court tried to charge him
with "kidnapping" migrants, Salvini's policy worked and landings plummeted. In
the first two months of 2019, 262 seaborne migrants reached Italy, compared to
5,200 in the same period last year, and more than 13,000 in the same period of
2017.
The Italian government collapsed on August 20; there is now the great
possibility that a new pro-immigration leftist coalition will take its place. A
ship attempting to bring to Italy 356 migrants from Africa, more than all who
came in the first two months, has been stranded at sea since it picked up the
migrants between August 9-12, while awaiting permission to land. In one standoff
after another, NGOs have been attempting to break Salvini's barricade against
illegal immigration.
One ship already did. One of the captains of the Sea Watch 3, a German citizen,
Pia Klemp, was even honored by the city of Paris for breaking the Italian
blockade. According to the other German captain, Carola Rackete: "My life was
easy... I am white, German, born in a rich country and with the right passport"
-- as if her determination to help migrants would be, in her own words, related
to the comparatively privileged life she has lived in the West.
It is a false Marxist notion among young people in Europe that if you are
successful or comfortable, it can only have been at the expense of humanity: "If
I win, somebody else must lose." There seems to be no concept at all of
"win-win" -- "If I win, all of you can win too: everyone can win!" -- that
underpins a free-market economy and has lifted so much of the world so
spectacularly out of poverty. Many of the young people see only barriers to be
broken down. Pascal Bruckner called it, the "tyranny of guilt".
Unfortunately, the price for cultural relativism has become painfully visible in
Europe. The disintegration of Western nation-states is now a real possibility.
Multiculturalism -- built on a background of demographic decline, massive
de-Christianization and cultural self-repudiation -- is nothing more than a
transitional phase that risks leading to the fragmentation of the West. Among
the reasons for that, the historian David Engels listed "mass-migration, the
aging of the population, Islamization and the dissolution of nation states".
Mass-migration has already undermined the unity and solidarity of Western
societies and -- combined with demonizing Israel in the hope of obtaining
inexpensive oil and preventing terrorism -- has destabilized the post-1945
political consensus.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's policy of open doors -- "Wir schaffen das"
("We can do it") -- led to a right-wing party in her parliament. The Alternative
for Germany (AfD) is now leading the polls in regional elections in the former
East Germany. The French Socialist Party, which governed the country under
President François Hollande, is now disappearing. The diktats of Brussels on
immigration and quotas have broken the unity of Europe and resulted in the
virtual "secession" of the Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia). The migration utopia in Sweden brought a populist
right-wing party into parliament, and the arrival of half a million illegal
immigrants pushed the once-marginal League of Matteo Salvini to the top of
Italy's political establishment.
This list does not even include Brexit, the British vote to leave the EU.
According to German journalist Jochen Bittner, writing in The New York Times
last year:
"In late 2015, the Leave campaign started putting up placards which showed the
exodus of refugees from Syria and other countries through the Balkans, and
adorned them with slogans like 'Breaking Point' and 'Take Back Control'. With
Ms. Merkel declaring an open-door policy, the message hit home for millions of
worried Britons and Europeans. Not coincidentally, it was around this time that
support for Brexit began to tick up".
Instead of crying at "populism" and "nationalism" all the time, might Europe
rethink its decision?
Currently, the Europe that promised to avoid building more walls after 1989,
when the Berlin Wall came down, is raising one after another one to defend
itself from an unprecedented situation. There is the 15-meter Spanish barrier in
Ceuta and Melilla; the Hungarian wall of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; one at
Calais in France; an Austrian fence planned at its border with Italy, a fence
Slovenia wants to build at its border with Croatia and North Macedonia's fence
for its border with Greece.
Whether one likes it or not, Europe seems to be feeling an existential cultural
threat from these great migratory flows. There is not only the pressure of
illegal immigration; there is also pressure from legal immigration. More than
100,000 people applied for asylum in France in 2017, a "historic" number, and
more than 123,000 applications in 2018. In Germany, there were 200,000 requests
for asylum in 2018.
This mass immigration is changing Europe's internal composition. In Antwerp, the
second-largest city in Belgium and the capital of Flanders, half the children in
elementary schools are Muslim. In the Brussels region, you can get some idea of
the change by studying the attendance of religion classes in primary and
secondary schools: 15.6% attend Catholic classes, 4.3% Protestant and Orthodox
classes, 0.2% attend Judaism classes, and 51.4% attend Islamic religion classes
(12.8% attend secular "ethics" classes). Is it clearer now what will happen in
the capital of the European Union? We should not be surprised that immigration
tops the list of worries of the Belgian population.
Marseille, the second-largest city in France, is already 25% Muslim. Rotterdam,
the second-largest city in the Netherlands, is 20% Muslim. Birmingham, the
second-largest city in Britain, is 27% Muslim. It is estimated that in one
generation, a third of the citizens of Vienna will be Muslim. "Sweden is in a
situation that no modern country in the West has ever found itself in", observed
Christopher Caldwell. According to the Pew Research Center, Sweden might well be
30% Muslim by 2050; and 21% Muslim in the unlikely event that the flow of
immigrants stops altogether. Today, 30% percent of Sweden's babies have
foreign-born mothers. The city of Leicester in the UK is presently 20% Muslim.
In Luton, out of 200,000 inhabitants, 50,000 are Muslim. Most of the population
growth in France between 2011 and 2016 was driven by the country's large urban
areas. At the top are Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and the Paris area, according to
a study published by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic
Studies. In Lyon, there are about 150,000 Muslims out of a population of
400,000. According to one article, 18% of the newborns in France carry a name
that is Muslim. During the 1960s, the number was 1%.
In the most extreme scenario, the percentages of Muslims in Europe in 2050 are
estimated to be: France (18%), UK (17.2%), Netherlands (15.2%), Belgium (18.2%),
Italy (14.1%), Germany (19.7%), Austria (19.9%), Norway (17%). 2050 is just over
the horizon. What, then, is to be expected in two or three generations, when the
late historian Bernard Lewis said that Europe would, "at the very latest", be
Islamic ?
Unfortunately, the European mindset refuses to face the reality, as if the
challenge is too severe to be addressed. "The unstoppable progression of this
system makes me think of a tea on board the Titanic", prominent French
philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes.
"It is not by turning a blind eye to tragedy that it will be prevented from
happening. What will be the face of France in fifty years? What will the cities
of Mulhouse, Roubaix, Nantes, Angers, Toulouse, Tarascon, Marseille and the
whole Seine Saint-Denis department look like?"
If the population changes, the culture follows. As the author Éric Zemmour
points out, "after a certain number, quantity becomes quality".
While the power of European Christianity seems to be falling off a demographic
and cultural cliff, Islam is making giant strides. It is not just a question of
immigration and birth rates; it is also one of influence. "In September 2002 I
participated in a meeting of the cultural centers of the leading European Union
member states in Brussels", the German-Syrian intellectual Bassam Tibi,
Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the University of Göttingen,
wrote.
"The conference took place under the theme 'Penser l'Europe' ['Thinking of
Europe'] while being given the title 'Islam en Europe'. There, I was disturbed
to hear Tariq Ramadan speaking of Europe as dar al-Shahada, i.e. house of
Islamic belief. The attending audience was alarmed, but did not get the message
of the perception of Europe in an Islamist mindset as a part of house of Islam.
If Europe is no longer perceived as dar al-Harb/house of war, but viewed as part
of the peaceful house of Islam, then this is not a sign of moderation, as some
wrongly assume: it is the mindset of an Islamization of Europe..."
The good news is that nothing is set in stone. Europeans could still decide for
themselves how many immigrants their societies need. They could put in place a
solution that is coherent rather than chaotic. They could still rediscover their
humanistic heritage. They could resume having children and they could launch a
real program of integration for the immigrants already in Europe. But none of
these steps, necessary to avoid the transformation of large parts of the
continent and its falling apart, is taking place.
It is important to listen to Pierre Manent's prognosis and to reject the current
fashion of self-abasement. Europe seems to be afflicted with a skepticism about
the future, as if the decline of the West is actually a justified punishment and
a liberation from its faults of the past. Yes, many faults may have been
terrible, but are they truly so much worse than the faults of many other
countries, such as Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, Mauritania, Cuba, Nigeria,
Venezuela or Sudan, to name just a few? More important is that at least the
West, as opposed to many other places, has tried to correct its faults. Most
important is to avoid over-correcting and ending up in a situation worse than
before.
"For me, today," notes Finkielkraut, "the most essential thing is European
civilization".
*Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and
author.
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or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
Why Iran must cool its rhetoric
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/September 01/2019
This month’s UN General Assembly in New York, taking place amid heightened
tensions between the US and Iran, has the potential be an effective platform for
the two countries to de-escalate those tensions. After all, it was during a UN
General Assembly that US President Barack Obama made a historic call to Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani, the highest level contact in almost 30 years.
Rouhani and US President Donald Trump will both address the gathering this year.
Will the American and Iranian authorities be ready to meet? How can there be
substantive negotiations between the two?
For this to happen, a peaceful and non-confrontational period is required
beforehand and the Iranian regime must show the international community that it
is willing to be a rational state actor rather than a revolutionary state. In
other words, Tehran must take steps to address concerns about its ballistic and
nuclear programs, its sponsorship of terrorist and militia groups across the
region, and its role in maintaining the security of the Strait of Hormuz.
Unfortunately, the regime appears to be going in the opposite direction. Its
attacks on commercial shipping in the Gulf pose significant threats to global
trade and the national security interests of the EU, and the US and its allies.
Thanks to Iran’s aggressive policies and reliance on hard power, commercial
shipping through the Strait of Hormuz now requires to be escorted by allied
naval vessels.
Thanks to Iran’s aggressive policies and reliance on hard power, commercial
shipping through the Strait of Hormuz now requires to be escorted by allied
naval vessels. Combined with Iran’s continuous funding of violent and terrorist
extremists, it is clear that the national security interests of US allies in the
region have not improved. Far from encouraging the Europeans to fight its
corner, Iran seems to be pushing them closer toward the Trump administration’s
way of thinking.
In addition, to make any progress at the UN, Iran needs to cool the heated
rhetoric and relinquish its unrealistic demands. After Trump said last month
there was “a really good chance” he would meet Rouhani soon, the Iranian
president responded that no such meeting would take place until all US sanctions
against Iran were lifted.
The rejection is probably an attempt to appease Iran’s hardliners and avoid
antagonizing them. From their perspective, it would be detrimental to Tehran to
enter negotiations with the US while Washington enjoys the upper hand; Iran’s
economy is in a dire state and Tehran has been under significant pressure
geopolitically.
In a show of defiance, Iran’s hardliners are vehemently rejecting any
possibility of talks with the US, and have ratcheted up their heated rhetoric.
The deputy chief of the army, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Dadras, warned last
week that Iran could an use its “secret defense facilities and capabilities” to
punish its enemies.
So at this point, the political and ideological gaps between the Trump
administration and the Iranian regime are too wide to bridge. To defuse tensions
and enable bilateral talks, Iran must first halt its belligerent and
destabilizing behavior in the region.
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist
Four days to save the United Kingdom
Baria Alamuddin/Arab News/September 01/2019
Some MPs are describing it as a coup. The Speaker of the House of Commons has
condemned it as a “constitutional outrage.” British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson’s shutting down of Parliament, to prevent MPs halting his headlong rush
toward a no-deal Brexit, has plunged British politics into entirely new depths
of chaos.
With a large majority of MPs steadfastly opposed to no-deal, Johnson is
resorting to non-democratic means to fulfil his pledge of severing Britain’s
relationship with Europe by Oct. 31, to the extent of lying about his motives
for “proroguing” Parliament: Johnson disingenuously claims that Parliament must
be closed to allow time to unveil a “bold and ambitious legislative agenda” — an
agenda that will never be enacted, either because the prime minister’s actions
will force a general election, or because a no-deal Brexit would trigger a shock
recession and derail spending plans.
Johnson has no democratic mandate for his actions. Three-quarters of Britons
oppose quitting the EU without a deal. A petition opposing Johnson’s
parliamentary “coup” rapidly accumulated nearly two million signatures.
Johnson’s government enjoys a nominal parliamentary majority of just one seat,
thanks to the 10 Northern Ireland MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party, who
themselves oppose no-deal Brexit.
Johnson has weakened his standing within his own party by purging moderates and
bringing in a narrow cabal of hard-right Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg,
Dominic Cummings and Dominic Raab.
Britain has blundered into constitutionally murky waters: What is legally
permitted or politically possible in these unprecedented circumstances has never
been put to the test, and it is now a question of who can seize the initiative.
Johnson’s coup puts his opponents on the defensive, forcing them to consider
desperate and hitherto unthinkable measures.
These pro-European MPs now have just four days of parliamentary time to force
some kind of counter-putsch through Parliament. This could mean legislation
ordering the government to ask the EU for a delay to the exit date, or the
“nuclear option” of a no-confidence vote, which would require persuading
significant numbers of Conservative MPs to vote against their own leader.
With a large majority of MPs steadfastly opposed to no-deal, Johnson is
resorting to non-democratic means to fulfil his pledge of severing Britain’s
relationship with Europe by Oct. 31.
Johnson continues to insist that he wants a deal with the EU, and that those who
are acting against him are undermining his negotiation position with Brussels.
Yet European leaders firmly reject the premise of Johnson’s demands, and the
prime minister belligerently rejects any delay to the exit deadline — which
would be required so that Parliament can vote on any deal that may be agreed. In
fact, there is no deal to be had on Johnson’s terms. He and his extremist
acolytes transparently intend to steamroller through a catastrophic no-deal
scenario.
Seventy percent of the food Britain exports goes to the EU, and 60 percent of
Britain’s food imports come from the EU. Europe’s high trade barriers would make
a no-deal exit ruinous for agriculture. One report estimates half of British
farmers would be forced out of business. Consumers will endure punishing price
rises, empty shelves in supermarkets and unavailability of medicines and
essential goods, while food rots in lorries stuck in immense queues on both
sides of unnecessary borders. Vehicle and aviation manufacturing, steel,
chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other huge employers are being forced overseas,
costing thousands of jobs.
The principle sticking point for reaching a deal has been the status of Ireland.
Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic have reaped the benefits of a fragile
peace process that Johnson intends to callously throw to the wolves. Britain’s
Police Federation warns of “wide-scale disruption” and escalating violence in
Northern Ireland as a consequence of no-deal. With the Scots rethinking the
merits of independence, the “United Kingdom” is disintegrating before our eyes.
Charting his path to power, Johnson during the 2016 referendum sold Britain a
lie about “taking back control.” Today, like Prof. Pangloss, he prescribes
“optimism.” Citizens who have been drip-fed poisonous anti-European propaganda
by xenophobic right-wing sections of the media must now endure job losses and
spiralling living costs. Much of the country remains wedded to a nostalgic,
isolationist myth of a freshly independent Great Britain, unmoored from its
foreign restraints, sailing off proudly into the sunset. They shrug at no-deal
warnings: “Just get it done!”
As small and large businesses alike are dashed upon the rocks of gratuitous
economic sabotage, only a fringe super-rich elite stands to gain from Britain
becoming an unregulated tax haven on Europe’s margins. Donald Trump talks about
a British trade deal with malicious relish, knowing that in the UK’s lamentable
state, it will soon be compelled to sign anything. Yet Britons are loath to see
supermarkets flooded with substandard, chemically treated US produce.
Consumed by domestic woes, Britain has become irrelevant on foreign policy. The
Foreign Office hardly bothers any more to trouble journalists with limp-wristed
statements of “concern” about events in far-flung parts of the world, and
no-deal promises new depths of irrelevance.
The impact of no-deal is being compared to that of the Second World War (indeed,
the last forcible prorogations of Parliament led to England’s 17th-century Civil
War), with Johnson determined to reduce his nation to a basket-case banana
republic.
Britain’s economic wellbeing has long been premised on its pivotal location as
the globalized gate into Europe. Amid the poverty, recession and unemployment
that will ensue from a no-deal Brexit, civil unrest and anger against the
political classes are the predictable bitter fruits of such an ill-fated and
ill-judged isolationist course.
It is consequently not hyperbole to say that rational politicians from all
parties have just days to come together and rescue the UK. I will be one of very
many praying that they succeed.
*Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle
East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has
interviewed numerous heads of state.
Peace in Afghanistan remains a distant dream
Talmiz Ahmad/Arab News/September 01/2019
The Taliban spokesman in Doha, Suhail Shaheen, announced last week that the US
and the Taliban were close to a peace agreement and that only operational
details remained to be finalised. The head of the US delegation, Zalmay
Khalilzad, arrived in Kabul on Sunday to seek the backing of President Ashraf
Ghani. Once the Kabul government is on board, the agreement will be signed in
Doha before representatives from several governments.
The agreement provides for the phased withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan
over the next 15-18 months; a commitment by the Taliban not to provide space and
sanctuary to extremist groups in territory controlled by it; implementation of a
cease-fire; and a dialogue between the Taliban and the Afghan government to
finalise a political setup that would accommodate the Taliban in the country’s
divided and contentious political order.
The intra-Afghan dialogue is expected to take place in Oslo a few weeks after
the agreement is signed. This will set the stage for national elections on Sept.
28.
The US-Taliban agreement marks the end of the US military intervention in
Afghanistan from October 2001, when it attacked the Taliban “emirate” in
response to the 9/11 assaults on the American homeland. Though the Taliban and
Al-Qaeda forces were decimated, and their top leaders fled to the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas for sanctuary, the US and other coalition
forces stayed on in the country to try to shape a new liberal and democratic
order.
This ambitious agenda was never realized. The Taliban returned to Afghanistan
from 2004 onwards and soon controlled large swaths of territory, with huge
financial resources from a boost in poppy production. President Obama,
recognising the futility of the US venture, began the withdrawal of US forces,
bringing their numbers down from 100,000 in 2010 to 8,400 in January 2017. Trump
increased this number by 4,000 in 2017.
The military intervention has been a sustained disaster: US forces suffered over
2,300 dead and over 20,000 wounded, while the Afghans have suffered 20,000 dead
every year. This year the government and its US allies have caused more Afghan
civilian deaths than the Taliban and other militants: Up to the end of July,
they had killed over 700 civilians as against 500 killed by the Taliban and
other militants.
Though the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces were decimated, and their top leaders
fled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas for sanctuary, the US and other
coalition forces stayed on in the country to try to shape a new liberal and
democratic order.
The peace process has been controversial. Though the US and the Taliban are now
the closest to peace since 2001, critics have pointed out that Trump has been
motivated mainly to getting his soldiers home quickly so that he can reap
benefits in the election next year. This peremptory withdrawal, they believe,
will leave the country’s nascent democracy and human rights achievements at the
mercy of the Taliban, who are expected to repeat the atrocities associated with
their “emirate” in the 1990s.
There are also concerns that, with the US out of the military equation, the
Taliban will ride roughshod over the democratic process, show little regard for
participation in governance, and will seek to re-shape the country based on
their hidebound beliefs and norms.
There could be other problems. The Taliban are not a monolithic body, but a
loose association of diverse groups, with ambitious leaders and differing
ideologies. They include hardliners who might not accept the moderate line being
espoused at the Doha discussions.
The Taliban expert Antonio Giustozzi has suggested that extremists from the
Pakistani Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the Haqqani network could link up with
hardliners from the Afghan Taliban and join the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK),
which has expanded from a few dozen fighters in 2014 to about 2,500-4,000
militants at present.
Neither the Taliban nor the ISK have reduced their violence. While the Taliban
continue their regular attacks on government forces and inflict heavy
casualties, an ISK suicide bomber attacked a 1000-strong wedding party in Kabul
on Aug. 17, killing over 60 guests and wounding about 200. Jason Burke has
explained that, as the Taliban succumbs to moderation and compromise, the ISK is
seeking to project itself as the main opposition force in the country and wants
a territorial enclave for its revived “caliphate.”
The Afghan peace process is also expected to aggravate rivalry between India and
Pakistan, already at loggerheads because of India’s recent initiatives in Jammu
and Kashmir. Pakistan has made it clear that it will not relinquish space in
Afghanistan. It has acquired this influence by consistently backing the Taliban,
which in the early 1990s it had organized, indoctrinated, armed, trained and
supported in battle, culminating in the realisation of the “emirate.”
India has traditionally viewed the Taliban as an extremist entity and believes
that its presence in Afghanistan undermines the democratic Kabul government and
jeopardizes the country’s liberal and pluralistic society.
This could change: From both Indian and Taliban sources there are indications
that engagement between them is likely. Afghan diplomats and a Taliban spokesman
have firmly asked Pakistan not to link the recent developments in Kashmir with
the Afghan situation.
Thus, amid these contentions, even if the US finalizes the agreement with the
Taliban, the prospect of peace in the country remains remote.
*Talmiz Ahmad is an author and former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman
and the UAE. He holds the Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis
International University, Pune, India.
The Syrian wind is turning against Erdogan
Yasar Yakis/Arab News/September 01/2019
Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid a one-day visit to Moscow last week to talk to
Vladimir Putin. Five days before the visit, the Turkish and Russian presidents
had a telephone conversation, but apparently they needed a more comprehensive
face-to-face talk.
After the closed-door meeting in Moscow, they made statements indicating
agreement on a wide range of issues such as economic relations, progress in the
construction by Russia of a nuclear power station in Turkey, completion of the
TurkStream gas pipeline through the Black Sea, co-production of defense
equipment and Turkey’s purchase of Su-57 stealth fighters. They also talked
about Libya, Kashmir and other developments in the Middle East. Dmitry Rogozin,
head of the Russian Space Agency, even proposed that Erdogan send a Turkish
astronaut to space in 2023, in cooperation with a Russian team, to coincide with
the centenary of the proclamation of the Turkish Republic.
However, on one issue they are still far apart: Idlib.
The day before Erdogan and Putin met, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
explained Russia’s position. The Assad regime attack on a Turkish convoy near
Khan Sheikhun on Aug. 19 was “legitimate and legal,” he said. “The terrorists
carried out several attacks from Idlib, not only on the Syrian army, but also on
the Russian military base in Hmeimim. It is only natural to attack these
terrorist nests. We did not promise anyone that we would not attack terrorists.
This policy of Russia is also in line with the UN Security Council resolution on
Syria.”Putin said much the same when he spoke to Erdogan by telephone, so
Erdogan already knew the Russian position on Idlib before the two leaders met.
After their meeting, Erdogan repeated Ankara’s position: Turkey was already
hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees; several hundred thousand refugees were now
moving toward the Turkish border; Turkey had established camps on the Syrian
side of the border and was trying to help them in Syrian territory.
In fact, this is what Turkey should have done years ago, at the start of the
Syrian conflict, in cooperation with the international community. Instead Ankara
chose to set up camps in Turkey, and failed to liaise with other countries.
Erdogan says the only way to translate into action the terms of the Sochi
agreement is to prevent the regime’s attack on civilians.
Now, if the number of the civilians fleeing their homes in Idlib continues to
increase, this will cause a security risk for Turkey, because many terrorists
may be among those civilians. Erdogan says the only way to translate into action
the terms of the Sochi agreement is to prevent the regime’s attack on civilians.
Despite this wish, the Syrian authorities may continue to bomb civilian targets
to force them to flee and later bomb the same places more intensively in order
to exterminate the armed opposition. It may also do this with the intention of
embarrassing Turkey by amassing refugees at the border.
Among the subjects Putin mentioned during the press conference after the
meeting, two points were worth noting. One was when he said: “We decided to work
together to eliminate the terrorist groups that are still operating in the Idlib
province and consequently in Syria as a whole.” This shows that Putin did not
change his initial position after listening to Erdogan, and instead invited him
to cooperate in eliminating terrorist groups.
The second is the reference he made to UN Security Council Resolution 2254.
Turkey never refers to it, but this resolution provides that all Al-Qaeda and
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham terrorist organizations may continue to be targeted,
despite the cease-fire. All countries have a contractual obligation, according
to the UN Security Council Resolution, to continue to fight these militant
factions. Therefore, Turkey’s complaints about the Syrian government’s doing so
cannot be easily substantiated.
Turkey must have eventually understood that the Syrian wind is turning against
it. The Syrian government, after having defeated most of the armed opposition —
except the Kurds, which is a separate issue — is now focusing on Idlib. It will
probably do everything to eliminate the armed opposition. Russia is clearly
supporting Syria in this endeavor, because the Hmeimim air base is close to
Idlib. Furthermore, there must be many terrorists of Chechen origin in Idlib. If
they are not eliminated in Idlib, they may find their way back to Chechnya, in
Russia. Moscow would prefer to eliminate them in Idlib.
These subjects will probably be raised in the trilateral summit to be held next
month in Turkey, and Erdogan may face tougher resistance there.
*Yasar Yakis is a former foreign minister of Turkey and founding member of the
ruling AK Party. Twitter: @yakis_yasar